The past couple of years have been quite challenging for many businesses. Their experiences have helped them understand more about their business and consider measures to future-proof it.
Future-proofing your business means taking the right steps to make sure you’re promoting its long-term success. The truth is that small businesses don’t have the same financial flexibility as larger or mid-sized businesses do.
Fortunately, there’s nothing to worry about because, in this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about how you can future-proof your startup business.
Build a strong online presence
Your startup is much more than a mission statement. It shows what your business projects, tell your customers what they can expect from it, and what it is going to offer them in the future.
Your online presence gives you a competitive edge and makes your business reputation much stronger within your industry, attracting employees and loyal customers for the upcoming years.
You don’t need to have a large budget to build a strong brand, but it’s more dependent on the type of strategies you are following. Here are some great tips you can follow for building a stronger online presence:
- Get active on social media: Define your target audience and find out which social media channel they are most active on. There are more than 5 billion users using social media right now. Promoting your content on social media channels is an excellent way to engage on a deeper level with your audience and to build your online presence. Moreover, the great part is that you can directly communicate with your audience if they have any questions regarding your product and service.
- Make a good first impression: First impressions matter a lot when it comes to building a strong online presence. A good first impression can be set by building a good website (both visually and functionally) and showcasing your products on social media channels.
- Focus on delivering a good customer experience: Customer experiences are what dictate how someone thinks about your brand. A positive customer experience will allow everyone to spread good words about you, and this can be done when you address customer issues right away.
A good online presence is an accumulation of building a good website, being active on social media channels, and making sure that you’re focused on addressing any problems your customers have.
Use a merchant cash advance
A Merchant Cash Advance (MCA) is an upfront working capital provided to businesses, mostly startups. The associated costs are remitted through the percentage of your daily and weekly sales. Let’s dive deeper into learning more about how a merchant cash advance works:
- Choose a MCA provider
- Complete an application
- Submit the required documents like the payment and several statements that involve your transaction history
- Review your offer
- The provider will go through an underwriting process
- After you’re approved, you’ll receive the funds shortly
- The advance will then be remitted automatically on a daily and weekly basis through the sales you make
Just like any other business offer you have to deal with, it’s important to carefully review your offer. Don’t go with the first offer you see, but take your time and see which offer fits you the best.
Include protective measures against attack surfaces
An attack surface is the total amount of possible entry paths that can be used for exploiting a computer network or system. In short, this means all the possible ways an online criminal can get a hold of your sensitive information.
Moreover, let’s learn more about the main aspects of a network attack surface:
- Network Perimeters: All of the network parts that are exposed to the online world and other untrusted networks.
- Applications and APIs: These are common areas that attackers will usually look at. It’s an important part of your attack surface that you need to regularly monitor and test.
- Endpoints: Includes laptops, mobile phones, and employee workstations. These will expose much fewer services, and attacks will occur when a user clicks on malicious links that exploit and target a vulnerability.
- Physical attack surface: Includes when online attackers get a hold of your physical entry points to your devices. Some examples include the doors to your offices, physical ports, and USB ports.
- 3rd-party attack surface: If your data is stored on some 3rd-party organization, this is part of an attack surface as well. If the organization that stores your information is attacked, this puts your data at risk too.
No need to worry, there are always methods of how you can reduce your attack surface. Here are three important steps to follow:
- Discover: Find where your assets are located. What do you need to protect? It’s always a good idea to use asset discovery tools to help you out.
- Detect: Use automated scanning processes for detecting services that assets expose.
- Reduce: Check out what is exposed and what is necessary to expose.
Your attack surface can be reduced, but it’s always important to learn more about it and find out where it’s coming from.
Invest in business insurance
Business insurance is excellent for preparing and planning to stop any potential business risks. No matter how prepared you are, it’s almost impossible to predict what the future holds and how it can impact your organization. That’s why you must get business insurance for your company from day one.
The cost of your business insurance will strongly depend on your company’s size and insurance needs. The problem is that lots of companies will sign up for insurance policies without entirely understanding them. While it may provide a temporary fix, it can significantly lead to large financial losses later on.
The whole point here is to get the insurance you need and avoid paying for parts you don’t need. The key to finding the right business insurance is to do research. Don’t hesitate to ask an insurance agent questions. Lay out your options and compare them, also, don’t forget to read what the insurance covers. Always go with the more cost-friendly option and that covers the most options.
Use the minimal viable product (MVP) method
MVP is most commonly used by businesses for future-proofing their businesses and encouraging open innovation. MVP is a simplified version of your new product that is marketed only using the basic features that are enough to catch the customers’ attention.
MVPs are used before releasing a new product to get more info about first impressions and how customers react to the product. This helps you learn more about your customer’s reactions and make improvements to your new product as needed.
For example, if anything goes wrong, you can make adjustments and even ask for feedback to see what type of improvements need to be made. It’s a great approach for future-proofing product development and helps you avoid losing time and money.
Embrace sustainability
Embracing sustainability isn’t only good for the environment, but for your business as well. 67% of business leaders are concerned about climate change and the impact it has on the environment. It’s highly important for the future of the economy, and most businesses are taking important steps to reduce their impact on the environment.
Embracing sustainability doesn’t need to be a huge lift, but can be done with some simple practices such as turning your computers off at the end of the day, turning off the overhead lights when they don’t need to be used, and other practices that are better for the environment.
Some tips you can follow for improving the sustainability of your startup include:
- Going paperless and reducing waste: Implementing cloud storage is a much better option.
- Use LED lights: Compared to traditional yellow light bulbs, LED lights consume much less energy and can be a better way of not only saving energy but also doing what’s right for the environment.
- Invest in eco-friendly shipping materials: This includes recycled cardboard, biodegradable peanuts, and more.
Embracing sustainability is becoming a new normal and plays an important role in future-proofing your startup. Let’s not forget that customers will also appreciate a business that is focused on promoting a greener environment.
Future-proofing is the future of a business’s success
Future-proofing your business isn’t as hard as you may think, but rather is taking the right steps from now to prevent anything from going wrong. When it’s done right, it won’t feel like you are behind competitors, but one step ahead of them.
Future-proofed companies have an advantage since they know how to easily adapt, optimize, plan for future events, and above all, prevent business failures.
About The Author:
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. He has been in the writing industry for four years and has managed to write over 600 SEO-optimized articles; Many, which have ranked #1 on Google. Tony’s primary concern when writing an article is to do extensive research and ensure that the reader is engaged until the end.
