Starting a business can be a scary process, especially when it’s your first time going down this route. It will be hard to know how many people will be interested in what you have to offer, and the work which is involved with this process can often be too much for one person to manage.
Of course, though, despite these concerns, it’s always worth taking the plunge. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring big businesses, and some of the methods which can be used to take advantage of them for the benefit of your own company. Here’s how to use Big Businesses To Your Advantage As An Entrepreneur.
Outsourcing/Reselling
There will be times during the early days of your business when you don’t feel as though you have enough time for everything on your plate.
To be able to grow, though, you need to be able to handle work quickly and effectively, creating a challenge when you start to become overwhelmed.
There are loads of big companies out there who can take on this extra workload for you. Approaching them as either a normal customer or as a business client, you will always be able to offload some of your work onto someone else, with this approach becoming common practice in some industries.
Along with being able to outsource to larger companies, you may also have the option to simply resell their products. Digital goods are perfect for this, especially when they come in the form of a service, like data storage.
There are loads of companies out there which offer discounted services to businesses who want to sell them to someone else. Much like buying a physical product on the wholesale market, this is designed with high-volume users in mind, making it worth making sure that you’re getting enough customers to be able to justify going down this route with your business.
Getting Your Name Out
As your company first enters the world, one of the biggest challenges you will face will be to get people to know your name. This process can take many years if you let it happen naturally, with new users only finding out about you when they stumble upon your website.
Big businesses can help in this area, providing a range of different benefits, all of which can be unlocked very affordably. Below, you can find some examples of the sort of approach you can take with this, showing just how easy it can be to use other companies in this way.
- In-Store: Supermarkets and other large stores always have a lot of empty space in them. To make better use of this, a lot of managers will let smaller non-competitive companies buy small areas to use as a place to advertise. With a couple of pull up banners and a pile of flyers, you should be able to start building a name for yourself without having to spend a small fortune. Of course, though, you have to make sure that the customers in the place you choose are relevant to the business you’re running.
- Giveaways: Competitions have become a very popular marketing method over the last few years, with loads of organisations, big and small, throwing their hats into this ring. While this has made this method a little stagnant, the giveaways which the larger players run will still gain traction. By teaming up with a larger company, you will be able to use the success of a joint giveaway to get a lot more people through your door.
- Online: Of course, there are ways to achieve this sort of goal without spending any money at all. Social media opens the doors to interactions with larger companies, with simple comments on their posts often being enough to help you to ride their success. While this may seem a little underhand, it gives you a chance which you’d never have had, and this makes it well worth it. You have to be careful, though; people won’t respond very well if it looks like you’re spamming your company.
Market Research
Understanding the customers you plan to sell to is a big part of any successful business. Conducting market research can be an expensive and lengthy process, though, with big businesses often spending a small fortune before they go ahead with plans for a product.
If you can’t afford this process, though, you’re not completely out of luck. Instead, you just need to look for larger companies which have already researched your field of interest in the past. You might not like what you find, but this will still be worth it, as it could save you from a lot of issues as you go into the future.
PR Fallout
Large companies often have a hard time keeping the general public happy. Whatever they do, they will be under scrutiny, and the odds are that someone won’t like what they’re doing.
In some cases, this sort of controversy will make it into the news, dominating other stories and giving you a great chance to stick your neck out.
If you can show customers that you are different during this sort of PR fallout, you will open the doors to far more business than you’ve ever had before. When something goes wrong like this, people will be looking for an alternative business to put their trust into. There isn’t any reason why this can be your organisation, especially as your business grows.
With all of this in mind, you should be feeling ready to take on the challenge of turning the work of big businesses to your advantage. A lot of people will find it hard to take this sort of approach when they first start.
While it may seem dishonest, though, it’s important to remember that they would happily do the same to you. In fact, larger companies have been known to squash smaller ones, making it worth using whatever you can to get ahead of those you’re competing against.
This will get easier as time goes on, as you will learn which approach works best for you.
