Thinking Creatively
A burgeoning business has to be sort of financial gunslinger in order to make it. Most businesses go under within the first five years, and only a fraction of those who make a go at it stay in the market ten years or more. There are many things working against you, a lot of them bound in the government itself.
From taxation to bureaucracy, licensing, lawsuits, and more, you’ve got an uphill climb ahead of you just to stay “above-board”, and avoid having the tax people breathing down your neck. You’re going to need a good accountant, or at least access to one. Should you make it that far, then you’ve got competition and the economy to deal with.
All that comes in addition to the need for solid real estate, a good product or services, decent marketing, and consistent coverage of infrastructural costs throughout the term of your business’s operation. It’s no wonder many businesses begin by opening a line of credit and, to use a colloquial term, “floating” things for a while.
Here’s what that means: you’re always going to have a percentage of profits geared at maintaining the business itself. They’re like the cushion which keeps your business from sinking, they’re the life-raft keeping the entities of operation dry. That float is often financial, and at the beginning it’s begun with lines of credit.
Cost-Reduction Strategy
In order to reinforce that float, your strategy should be cost-reduction. You’ll want to use clever write-offs and payment arrangements facilitated through your accountant to defray Uncle Sam’s groping grip in a tax sense. From there, you’re going to want to diminish infrastructural expenses as much as possible.
Traditional overhead includes rent, employee pay, insurance, marketing, utilities, product production and distribution, travel, incidentals, equipment, any involved licensing fees, and aforementioned taxes. You’ve got to take care of these things before you consider the remaining funds profit. Your net is what remains after such deductions.
One way to save in the long run is to rent rather than owning, but you’ll need resources of the credit variety. Oftentimes you’ll be looking at a long-term loan you pay off gradually over the course of ten years or so. The faster you can pay it off, the better. But this isn’t much of a solution in the “short” term. For that, you may want a credit card.
Certain balance transfer credit cards allow you to attain cashback. When you’re looking for the best balance transfer credit cards, it makes sense to go through a site like Best.CreditCard, where you can find: “…all the information you need, like sign-up bonuses and awesome rewards.”
Using Everything Available To You
You’re definitely going to want to use those rewards. They’re a very real factor in your budgeting considerations. The key is to consider the credit card you source as part of your “float” expenses. You’ll probably always be paying it off, which means a certain portion of your business’s income will go to it perpetually. Think of it as a “credit tax”.
If you factor in your overhead, tax, credit tax, and incidentals into your growth on a regular basis, you can get an idea what your bottom-line profit must be on a regular basis in order to run your business profitably, and have some take-home. Remember, a good portion of your take-home will be geared at maintaining your household.
Generally, a small business grossing $250,000 or more every year may only be profiting it’s owner several thousand annually. If he’s got $10k in the bank, he’s doing quite well. That’s just the nature of the beast; but work hard and keep at it, you’ll see success one way or another, even if it’s in collateral. Small business is a mountain, but it’s climbable.