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If there is one thing that clients and customers rely on in business, it’s credibility. You need to be as professional as possible if you hope for people to sit up and take notice of what you are doing. You want to impress your customers, and when you have a sprawling city office this is easy to do. The thing is, you’re working out of the spare room in your home. You don’t have glass fronted walls and windows that overlook a city skyline. You don’t have a smiley receptionist waiting to greet your guests and you don’t have ergonomic furniture and sleek, impressive desks with the latest in business tech on top of them.
Instead, you have an office that still has a spare bed stacked in the corner. You have a small fridge downstairs in a shared kitchen, and you have a battered old computer that you’ve had for years. The other thing that you have is a business. A business with a product or service that is of interest to people and is gathering considerable traction in the industry. With all this in mind, you have to consider how your business appears to outsiders and how professional you look. Professionalism doesn’t equal huge budgets to spend; you can be as professional as you want to on a small budget. It’s simply a question of where you’d like to spend your cash. There are plenty of products and services that you can funnel your cash into to make you look more like the big business that you hope to one day become. We’ve got five of the simplest ways that you can do that. As they say; fake it ‘til you make it!
You Need An Address. There’s nothing professional about using your home address for your business, because you’re mixing business with your personal life doing it. It can also be dangerous to list your home address against your business online. You can use a company like https://physicaladdress.com to host your business on a virtual mailbox instead. This’ll allow you to receive packages for your business without having people knocking on the door of your home all day long. This can help to keep your business separate from your family life.
Change Invoice Numbers. Believe it or not, you can look like a much more established business by using higher invoice numbers. It can make it look like you’re in business far longer if you had invoice numbers starting at 7845 instead of 1. You don’t want to project the image of newness onto your customers or clients, so pick a nice big number to start on and number your invoices that way.
Grow Your Website. Your website is going to be the central way that customers contact you other than social media. You need to concentrate on your website to ensure that it ticks all of the boxes that you need it to tick. It should explain precisely what you do to those who visit, give them a guided tour of what you offer and show contact information from your company so that they can get hold of you for any questions. If you have a website that is lagging and not updated or optimised to the latest tech gadgets, people will switch off in favour of a more professional outfit.
Drop The Title. As the owner of a business, it’s obvious that you are the CEO. You could also be the head of marketing, the head of sales, the social media manager and the chief financial officer all at the same time. You can’t possibly list all of these job titles on the one business card, so it makes sense to just ditch the job title altogether until your business grows enough that you’ve made all those hires to work with you.
Utilise Skype. Not only do you have the capabilities of online chat, you can choose your business phone number and have a place where customers can call you that won’t clog up your home telephone line or your cell phone. The ability to chat to customers is important, as they need you to be in touch where you can be.
It can feel like you’re being a little dishonest – making your business look bigger than it is. However, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to make an impression on your customers, and as your company grows you’ll be far more equipped to handle the workload as an established team. You may even have glass walls and sleek desks one day.
This is a collaborative post.
Welcome to Birds and Lilies! I'm Lou: mother, blogger and freelance writer. This is my lifestyle blog, where I talk about motherhood, infertility and IVF, beauty, my love for food and wine, as well as my thoughts about stuff, and our real-life and travel adventures.
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