The Idealog guide to startups

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The idealog guide to startups

Before you cut the strings and chuck in the day job in favour of being master of your own destiny, read this

Starting your own business

The Idealog guide to

3750 START-UPS LAUNCH EACH MONTH.

TOUGH COMPETITION.

Get a real edge against the competition with our Start-up Business Edge package, including:

2.99% p.a. for the fi rst 12 months on all purchases on new cards1 and balance transfers2 with a GlobalPlus Business Visa when you apply by 10 September 2012.

No monthly account fees for 24 months with a MyMoney for Business transaction account (service and facility fees apply). Apply by 10 September 2012.3

BNZ Connect - free networking evenings for small business owners, and an online community for inspiration and advice.

Start-up Specialists - our 0800 line connecting you to Start-up Specialists seven days a week.

We’ll refer you to Business Mentors NZ and pay your $150 registration fee. Apply by 10 September 2012.4

GET THIS AND MORE WITH THE START-UP BUSINESS EDGE

On average an estimated 3750 start-ups launched per month in the year ending February 2010, Ministry of Economic Development, SMEs in NZ Structure and Dynamics Report 2011. BNZ lending criteria and account fees apply. Off ers are not available for businesses that have been trading for over two years or with turnover above $1 million per annum or managed by BNZ Partners. Full details, terms and conditions, BNZ’s Disclosure Statement and Qualifying Financial Entity Disclosure Statement may be obtained from any BNZ store or Partners Centre, or viewed on our website bnz.co.nz. 1. Simply make your fi rst purchase within 12 months of your credit card account opening to get the interest rate of 2.99% per annum. After 12 months from the date of your fi rst purchase, any outstanding balances will revert to the current credit card interest rate. 2. To obtain the balance transfer interest rate of 2.99% per annum you must apply for the balance transfer by 28 September 2012. Air New Zealand Airpoints™ Programme terms and conditions apply, visit airnewzealand.co.nz. Airpoints Dollars™ are not earned on the transferred balance and there are no interest free days. Balance transfers are subject to approval and terms and conditions apply. Eligibility for special rate limited to balances from non-BNZ New Zealand issued Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners, GE Credit Line, The Warehouse Financial Services Credit and Store Cards, Fisher & Paykel Finance issued Q Cards and Farmers Cards or from an overdraft account from a New Zealand bank, other than BNZ. Generally payments are applied to lower interest rate transactions fi rst. 3. MyMoney for Business account opening criteria apply. Fees are subject to change. See our Business Account Service and Facility Fee Brochure. 4. Business Mentors NZ - This off er must be redeemed by 10 September 2012. For further details on how to redeem the off er and eligibility criteria, call 0800 209 209. BNZ takes no liability for the provision or fulfi lment of third party products and services.

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Find out more in store 0800 269 763 bnz.co.nz/startup

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92 / idealog.co.nz/businessplan


TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS... MY WAY

Download from the iTunes App store today or find out more at business.govt.nz

The MobileBusiness Toolbox

Available on the ipad

App Store

FREE

The new Mobile Business Toolbox iPad app is full of business development tools and tips that will help you to grow a healthy business:

• Health checks• Business templates• Videos from the experts • Latest government-related news

Work on your business wherever and whenever suits you.

Want to work at your own pace without anyone breathing down your neck? Forget that, too. Expect

multiple work and payment deadlines, and almost constant pressure from folks you rarely even see. Once you’re out on your own, every ‘duvet day’ comes straight out of your own pocket. If you don’t get it done, it doesn’t get done, and there’s no money at the end of the month. Ideally, try not to get sick – and be nice to absolutely everybody you meet, just in case you need them.

The good news is that if you have a sound business idea, or can find a fertile little niche to inhabit, you could soon feel the thrill of making your own profits, rather than somebody else’s. And if the going gets tough, it can be much easier psychologically and practically to adjust your business to keep the pennies rolling than

Sick of bosses? Well, best not start your own business then. Because then you will have lots of people trying to be the boss at the same time: you, the bank manager, your stressed-out partner, your customers and the tax people to name just the ones that may keep you up all night in a cold sweat. But it’s worth it

it is to lose your job and have to go search for another one.

So roll up! Fist-pumping moments of sweet success await; as well as some healthy tax breaks and the chance to stop mumbling into your coffee about how you would run things differently.

Help! Doing the paperwork

What stops a lot of people starting a business, or failing once they have started, is not the core work they intend to do, but what they believe is all the red tape, paperwork, crap that goes with it. The first step to success is to destroy the belief in this separation. The paperwork and the folks who do it are every bit as vital as you are for making the business work. There are huge amounts of money, time, stress and even the odd day in court that can be saved by investing in getting all this stuff right at the outset. Trust us, your idea is not so hot that you should go ahead without this, and if you are reluctant to invest a little cash in it now, why are you even pursuing it at all?

Speaking of cash, keeping it flowing is the lifeblood of a business, so you need a good monitoring system to avoid nasty surprises.

Take time to shop around for the right bank to partner with your business: it may or may not be the same as for your personal accounts.

Think ahead on the services you might need and compare the packages and costs: will you need a loan, ongoing overdraft, remortgage?

Once you have narrowed it down to one or two banks, go and actually meet their people – they will soon be part of your businesses team, too. Easy-to-use online banking systems that allow you to keep a close eye on the money online or mobile can also be very useful.

Get a highly recommended accountant to squeeze the best out of the fearsome complexities of taxation and financial control, but it’s also advisable to do at least some of the accounts alongside them for the first year.

You want Tom Peters, one of

the world’s top business gurus with 30 years’ experience,

condensed into easy-read

Powerpoint slides, and you want it

free?! Oh all right then, visit:

excellencenow.com

The basics Business.govt.nz offers detailed advice and a host of online tools for those ready to go it alone, and www.nzte.govt.nz also has some handy guides on creating your business.

The idealog guide to Startups


TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS... MY WAY

Download from the iTunes App store today or find out more at business.govt.nz

The MobileBusiness Toolbox

Available on the ipad

App Store

FREE

The new Mobile Business Toolbox iPad app is full of business development tools and tips that will help you to grow a healthy business:

• Health checks• Business templates• Videos from the experts • Latest government-related news

Work on your business wherever and whenever suits you.

94 / idealog.co.nz/businessplan


Floppy disciplineImagine if somebody wheeled a trolley up to your work desk in the morning and said: “Hey, here’s a video machine that plays endless movies, oh and here’s a stack of the world’s best newspapers and magazines, also a stereo that plays all your favourite music, your friends from all over the world are chatting in our Facebook room behind you and under the desk I have left a stack of pornography and an arcade machine, but stay focused on doing the accounts all day, yeah?”

So just in case you or your employees don’t have the self-discipline of say, Ghandi, then it might be worth establishing some rules and regulations around computer use in your organisation, backed up with content filtering and monitoring. A good free and customisable filter is available at k9webprotection.com.

Pssst! The government has some cash for you – www.nzfundinggrants.org wants to give you some money to get started. Well, possibly. Check it out.

This will give you a good understanding of the numbers underpinning your business, help instill good financial discipline and record keeping, and ensure you have the experience to keep a close eye on what the bean counters are up to as time goes on.

If your business has some genuinely new ideas at its core, pay a visit to your friendly local specialist intellectual property lawyers. They can do all the normal stuff, but will also advise on just how ‘new’ your idea is, whether you can protect it from your would-be competitors, or how much protection you need from them.

Boot it up online

Get busy online with these helpful sites: businessmentors.org.nz If your business is your

primary income and employs fewer than 25 people, for a registration fee of $150 you can get two years’ worth of advice from someone who has been there and done that. If you don’t think that is a deal, don’t start a business.

business.govt.nz Your first step to running a company is to register it here.

ird.govt.nz Easy to use taxation advice that isn’t even completely terrifying.

acc.co.nz This will be covering you, your staff and your customers for any accidents that happen. Get in touch, provide accurate information, and keep an eye on how much you will need to cough up each year.

waveaccounting.com If you have a stable and secure internet connection and want to monitor your accounts free and online, this may be for you.

Branding and designing

If you have been working through this guide point-by-point, you have almost certainly already left it too late to start thinking about your brand. Because branding is all part of how you come up with a business that is going to capture people’s interest, and their dollars.

It starts from customer research: simply working out how your potential customers think, how they look at the world and the sorts of things they like. All the knowledge you can gain on that is then applied consistently to what your business is and does, and how it sees itself. Importantly, this is not just about the logo and the packaging. Anything and everything a customer, client or partner sees, hears, smells, touches or tastes that they can connect to you in any way is, by its very existence, inevitably and intrinsically part of your brand.

The key to getting it right is to continually align your business to the way the customers actually experience it. You will also need the

ability to be able to state clearly and simply the ways in which what you are offering is important and different to what the other business people have to offer.

And you will know if you do get it right because you won’t have to compete purely on price, or constantly have to respond to competitors that are one step ahead of you.

Branding dos and don’ts

Do get professionals working on every contact point with customers, whether it is a leaflet, an advertisement, a website, or a personal introduction (in other words, don’t let your wife/son/work experience people/yourself do the mailout, unless they really know what they are doing.)

Don’t get overexcited about the results you can produce on your own computer – owning a guitar does not make you Eddie van Halen. At least get it checked by a pro, or get them to provide some templates.

Don’t have ‘the website guy’ design the website in isolation from the ‘shop people’ doing your window display. Do have a central point for all branding activity and a rabid brand guardian who savages anyone breaking your clearly defined rules.

Don’t decide on your brand on the basis of what you like, decide it on the basis of what your customer will like.

Plugging your business in

Whatever your business, it is almost impossible, and certainly inadvisable to avoid some interaction with the computers, mobile devices and the internet. These days, to try to avoid this would be as limiting to most businesses as refusing to answer the phone. That said, it is not compulsory to have a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account and an email newsletter – they can be expensive and very demanding on staff time. The name of the game is, as with any business



tool, to establish the most effective use of resources to get the desired result: more sales. Decent advice can help you do that, so seek it out.

The more dependent your business is on computing power, the more robust and reliable a system you are going to need from the outset. The basics should be aimed at avoiding the loss of important work or business information and also making sure you are not upsetting customers with slow response times or virus spreading. The business’ computers should therefore be no more than about three years old, able to run the latest software and open all the most popular document formats, with up-to-date virus protection, a back-up drive you take home with you each night and a back-up power supply if you are at risk from power cuts frazzling things. Smartphones will allow you and your staff to be reachable for customers anywhere, but you may need to

exercise restraint in order to remain familiar with your partner and children.

Before marketing on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, talk to an expert, in other words, anybody under 20. It’s an emerging artform, and although there are some basic dos and don’ts, the key thing to remember is that it takes time, effort and a dose of luck to create a real relationship with others in a virtual world that will lead to actual sales. It can’t be faked or rushed.

Now you are in business

There’s a lot of good free advice and support out there for anyone wishing to start their own business, and even more good, reasonably priced advice and support. The key to success is in accessing the right help at the right time and getting the most out of it. The rest is up

Your business will be Better by Designbetterbydesign.org.nz is a specialist group within New Zealand Trade and Enterprise that serves up the hottest thinking on branding and design led business.

Thirty or so people share the new(ish) co-working space The Kitchen, which is based in Grey Lynn. Who are they? Social enterprise startups, with a focus on anything from reducing alcohol-related harm in the gay community through to edible gardens for private and commercial spaces. The Kitchen is the brainchild of academic Murray Sheard, who happened upon the idea after seeing something similar in London. Read all about it on page 32.

to you what kind of idea you have in the first place. The key questions to ask yourself are: have you got a unique selling point, is there a real market for what you have to offer, and do you have enough money to keep going until you turn a profit? If the answer to all those questions is yes, it is time to do some serious sums and think about writing ‘Dear ex-boss…’