What is the best thing about owning a business?
Owning your own business gives you the freedom to set your own agenda – to decide what success will look like for you on a personal level and providing you with the opportunity to achieve that success.
It’s not for everyone however! Often it will mean working alone – driving and holding yourself accountable each day for deciding the strategy and getting the job done. Many people are used to being managed by others and therefore struggle here. But the rewards are there if you persevere and are able to turn your business idea into a good business!
What challenges have you faced so far?
Our biggest challenge to date has been to raise awareness for our web based service with as many Kent based businesses as possible. Starting a business from scratch, particularly when you are delivering real innovation in terms of the product/service you are providing and, communicating the benefits to your target customers takes time and money!
We are fortunate in that we decided early on that we needed to partner and collaborate with other businesses in order to get our message across. To that end we entered into a long term sponsorship agreement with Kent Business Radio and the weekly ‘Business Bunker’ radio show to give us a constant, consistent presence within the Kent business community to help raise awareness of our service.
What inspired you to set up the business?
As small business owners, we all want and need to do more business! But many businesses struggle with;
• Limited resources – must use limited time/money effectively
• Small business contact/referral network, often only meeting the same people each week
• No real market presence – not on customers radar
• Little or no client base to speak of
SupplyMyBusiness.co.uk was created to offer a simple cost effective sales and marketing solution for small businesses in Kent with the following benefits;
• Access to Kent wide business & target customer network
• Affordable entry point
• Low maintenance
• Local relevance
• Deliver genuine ‘value add’ to the business in terms of leads/sales
Martin White is the Founder and Director of SupplyMyBusiness.co.uk