Setting up a business involves many factors, of which capital is a very important one. It is not that you always need a huge capital to fund your business; we all have heard about companies like Microsoft, which started in a garage, or Domino’s Pizza or Mary Kay, which started with only a few hundred dollars and grew into corporate giants.
However, in any business, cash flow is of immense importance and if you run out of capital, things will not look sunny. A small loan from the bank or merchant cash advance funding are good options to ensure that you don’t run out of capital when you have bills to pay but you have incurred a loss or your incoming cash flow is stuck.
Plan Carefully
For setting up a business or a start-up, the very first thing that you need is a business plan. Without a proper plan chalked out, it is likely that you might feel unsure where or how you’re headed in your business. Since you are setting up a business with a small capital, you have to plan very carefully about the input costs, which include labor charges, overhead expenditure, rent, etc. You might have to start only with yourself and optionally only a few more people as labor and make sure that your business will incur very little overhead charges so that you can sustain your business with small capital.
Granted that if you take a loan or avail merchant cash advance funding, you will have more cash at hand, but you have to keep in mind that it is not your money and you have to pay it back some way or the other. So it’s better to tightly regulate your expenditure from the very beginning and work a little extra hard for the first few years before your business flourishes and you gain enough capital from your profits.
Be Realistic
However, do not obsess over your plan so much that you end up sidelining your main business idea, the primary goal of your business. Probably, your business will not progress in the way you had planned it to, so don’t attach too much unnecessary importance to it. Think about it simply; you have an idea to sell a product or a service, that is your ultimate goal- and you will need to have a plan ready so that when you start your business you can go about achieving that goal in an organized and successful way.
Also, sometimes entrepreneurs may plan unrealistically- this is not desirable. You cannot think of building a spaceship with a few hundred dollars. Do not try to compete with giants at the very beginning, start with filling the gaps in the industry with your small business and in time it will grow.
With a small capital you can sell several kinds of commodities but do not expect to turn into a huge company in a short span of time. You can obviously expand your business in the long run, but having unrealistic expectations from your start-up or business can be detrimental and must be avoided.