Youve Started Your Start-Up
Now What?
Keith Grinsted has worked with many
start-up businesses over the years and
has seen the things they have done
right, and the things they have done
wrong!
He has been made redundant six times
in the past 18 years! Yes, he picked a few
duff companies to work for. However, in
his defense, some of these were in the
dot-com boom and bust years!
He knows and understands the issues
businesses face and how they must
constantly review and, in some cases,
reinvent.
Keiths main message: DO IT! If you
think that you can stand still and do
nothing, then you will certainly get left
behind and ultimately fail.
Keith Grinsted, MBA, FRSA
Abstract: This article looks at the position start-up busi-
nesses arrive at after 2 or 3 years. They get to a position
where the initial excitement may have waned and the
future is looming. Its a time when a complete review of
the business needs to be done and careful consideration
given to the future. The key question asked is: If you
were to start over today knowing what youve learned,
what would you change, or do differently?
Keywords: back office, business, career change, career
development, decision making, enterprise, entrepreneur,
finance, funding, marketing, passion, people, sales, staff,
start-up, strategy
Youve Started Your Start-Up: Now What?
At times, it may have seemed like being at the controls
of a runaway train as you got your start-up business
underway!
Year 0: It is all about getting your idea off the ground.
Putting your team in place and seeking out the neces-
sary funding.
Year 1: It is about getting out into the market. Achiev-
ing early sales and building on production or service
provision.
Year 2: You are heavily into product/service develop-
ment following initial customer feedback.
You are beginning to realize some of the stuff you
wanted to achieve has been easier than anticipated, but
much of it has been considerably tougher.
You have a much better understanding of where you
have got, and you are developing a clearer picture of the
future, in the short, medium, and long term.
You are entering year 3, being mindful that your origi-
nal funding for those early growth years is rapidly di-
minishing, so what are your plans now?
At every stage in the growth of a business, whether
year 1, year 10, or beyond, it is invaluable to carry out a
full evaluation of the business.
Expert Insights 1
 Youve Started Your Start-Up
When working with start-ups that have
got to 2, 3, or 4 years I always pose the
same question.
If you were to start over today, knowing
what youve learned in the past 12, 24, or
36 months, what would you change, or do
differently?
Now, its important at this stage to con-
sider every aspect of the business:
1. Back-office administration
2. Marketing and sales
3. Staffing
4. Production/service delivery
5. Customers
6. Finance
Well now look at some of these aspects.
Theres no intended prioritization here,
as each business will need to set its own
priorities.
Back-Office Administration
This relates to the important processes and
procedures supporting your entire busi-
ness. Ive chosen to start with this because,
in my own experience in a number of busi-
nesses, it is an area that easily gets left un-
til last, and yet if you get it right, you can
reap significant rewards.
You will have started out with basic ad-
ministrative processes, and I include here
what would have been the paper trail.
More often, much of this is now being
done electronically and may be harder to
monitor. This can be everything from sales
letters, quotations, purchase orders, invoices
through to payments.
The days when you could physically
check a letter or quote before it goes out in
the post have largely gone; when you could
check purchase orders physically against
delivery notes; and when you opened the
post in the morning and were refreshed
with the number of checks coming in from
satisfied customers.
In most businesses today much of this
hands-on control has disappeared. The
staff have become individually empowered
to deal with a lot of this stuff.
2 Expert Insights
Around 20 years ago, I was the General
Manager of a commercial removal-and-
storage outfit on the outskirts of London.
The owner was very autocratic and a bit
of a control freak. Even when we had over
100 staff and were up to 5 million annual
turnover, I had to sign off on every letter,
quote, purchase order, invoice, and monthly
statement. This may sound extreme, but we
had a reputation for quality of service, and it
stretched to every part of the business.
This level of control is not always possible
today, as so much of what we do is online
and not necessarily so easy to monitor.
In the old days, if you could read and
add up, it didnt matter whether it was a
letter, quote, or invoice. They were all
in the same format paper! These days,
you could be looking at Word documents,
Excel spreadsheets, an online order pro-
cessing solution, another for accounts,
and even more for payroll and employee
management.
At the head of your business, do you
learn how to use all these systems? Prob-
ably not! Instead, you buy in the necessary
expertise and must trust in the integrity of
others.
At every stage in the growth of your
business, please stop and take stock of the
systems and processes you have in place.
Make sure that they are serving the busi-
ness as it is today rather than as it was a
year or more ago.
You may have improved front-end pro-
cesses to speed up customer delivery, but
if it still takes you 2 weeks to process an
invoice through your back office, you are
in for cash flow problems.
Ive even heard the opposite case where
invoices have been sent out before the
goods have been dispatched! Unless you in-
sist on prepayment, this is not necessarily
the best way to keep your customers happy.
So please ensure that your systems are
fit for purpose today and not a series of
bolt-ons, or work-arounds, that are inevita-
bly going to fail one day!
 Youve Started Your Start-Up
Marketing and Sales
Ill deal with both here, as I strongly be-
lieve, having worked in both disciplines
for a significant part of my career, they are
part of the same continuum. And where
marketing becomes sales can be at vari-
ous stages depending upon the individual
organization.
Whichever way you look at it, sales and
marketing is all about finding and engaging
with prospective customers and actual cus-
tomers. It is a process of getting your prod-
uct or service out there in the marketplace.
Looking back at the business you have
achieved to date:
1. Where and how did you come across
those customers?
2. Where did you find them?
3. How did you find them?
4. How did you then engage with them and
transform them from suspects, through
prospects, to actual paying customers?
Having got them onboard as customers,
how have you then held on to them?
It has often been said that it costs some-
thing like ten times as much to find new
customers than it does to retain the exist-
ing ones!
Think back through your journey and
consider whether there may have been
a better, more efficient way to find those
prospects. Could the process of engaging
with them and converting them to custom-
ers be improved upon?
Consider also how well you have re-
tained those customers. What could you
have done better? Have you lost the cus-
tomers you thought youd have retained?
Why did they fall by the wayside? What
could you have done to retain them?
If you were to start your business over
today, with the knowledge you now have,
what would you do differently?
Markets change, and the way we engage
with them changes.
I mentioned earlier how I used to run
a commercial removal business. We spent
many thousands of pounds advertising in
Expert Insights
Yellow Pages directories. Now its all done
online at a fraction of the cost!
I have a view that it does not matter how
big or small your business is because, on-
line, it will only appear as big as the screen
upon which your prospect is viewing at a
particular moment!
It may be a large desktop display or
just a small smartphone screen. And just
a quick tip here do please ensure that
your website is mobile enabled. I see so
many that are not. If it is not mobile com-
pliant, not only will it appear rubbish on
a smartphone or tablet, but it also will
be marked down by Google, if not com-
pletely disregarded! And you dont want
that.
While you are considering your sales
and marketing performance to date, please
also consider the future.
How are you going to approach the
future?
There are probably three alternatives for
you to consider at this stage:
1. More of the same
2. New products/services
3. New markets
Lets look at each of these options in
turn.
More of the Same
Simply put, continue doing what youve
done to get you where you are today. If it
aint broke, dont fix it! This is quite ger-
mane if you are certain that your sales are
sustainable; that you can grow your sales,
your revenues, and your profits. But do be
mindful of some of the big tech compa-
nies and high street retailers that have dis-
appeared or have come close to it, simply
because they thought they could carry on
doing what theyd always done! They lost
track of the market!
Think Blackberry, Nokia, Woolworth,
C&A, BHS, and Kodak as just a few
examples.
Option 1 is the riskiest of the three op-
tions available to you.
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