Bite-sized Branding Episode 8 - What Should Your Start-up Budget Be?

There are so many elements you need to look at when starting a business. In this video we shared some of our thoughts of the key things you need to consider when starting a new business.

Here is a quick list to get you started:

• Registration: Make sure your business is registered and choose a structure that will help you mitigate risks https://register.business.gov.au/
• Legals: Ensure you have a professional review you Terms & Conditions, Contracts, Terms of Business, Privacy and Policy and any other legal documents to protect your business, we recommend speaking with a professional such as http://www.reevelaw.com.au/
• Operations: What tools will you use to manage internal and external processes? We record all our process in an intranet on https://sites.google.com/ and marketing and sales through https://www.hubspot.com/
• Branding and Marketing: budget for your brand strategy to ensure you position your business to attract the right type of customers. Then look at how you communicate this message effectively.

You don't want your business to become the best kept secret, make sure you save a budget that will allow you to build that strong foundation and get it out to market.

Consider looking at a percentage budget for marketing. That way it can come to grow to continue to support the business as it grows. For established companies, at least, 6%-12% of your gross revenue should be allocated to marketing as established brands don’t need to market as heavily. For a start-up you should look to allocate 15% of your gross revenue to marketing to allow for capacity to grow.

Allow space in the budget for experimentation so you can push the creative use of your multichannel marketing more effectively. If you're just rehashing strategies over and over, you will find it becomes stale and so does the response from clients. Having a campaign fail is invaluable learning, pivot quick using that knowledge to accelerate the next campaign.

So create a budget that you can comfortably afford month on month for a period of at least sixth months. This will be enough time to get the message out and allow the business to grow. Reach out to an agency and get an idea of budget from them so you can plan to save for your campaign.