How Hard Is It To Run A Business?

How Hard Is It To Run A Business?

Sean: I know a lot about my craft, but not about how to start and run a company. What do I need to do to change that?

You have to learn how to start and run the company. So how to start a company is not that hard. In terms of legal speak, you just have to register it in DTI or SEC, if you want to go corporate right away. So starting a company is not that hard. Running it is a lot harder. So hiring people, making sure that you serve your market well, making sure that you’re still the best at what you do, those are the things that I think are going to make it difficult for you. Leading people as well is very hard. Managing them also is very hard. Two different things, but both hard things that you need to do.

Yeah, those are some things that you’re going to have to learn from mentors, from books, from podcasts. I learned a lot of them when I was starting out from books. And I had a couple of mentors as well, who I could ask questions from. So this is a really good thing that you’re asking me this question, because now you’re going to have ideas. Some books that I suggest you start with is Start with Why by Simon Sinek and Good to Great by Jim Collins. Those are really good places to start with.

How do you identify the right target market for your business?

For me, I use Google. So I look at what people are searching for. So when you type in Google, it usually suggests to you certain keywords. So for example, since I used aquascape.ph as an example before, with aquascape.ph, if I type on Google aquatic plants Philippines, or aquatic plants for sale Philippines, Google will suggest a lot of keywords related, or relevant to it. And if a lot of keywords popped up, that’s a pretty good sign. You could also use Google trends to see if the trend is going up, going down, is it sustainable, and you will know if you have a working business there that has a good target market, that has enough business.

For my aquascape.ph website and business, I also look at how many people are searching for, for example, blue shrimp or neocaridina davidi. Are people really looking for it on Google? Because if they are, they’re probably looking to buy it for their own tanks. And if there are people searching for it, there’s search volume, Google is suggesting that people are searching for it, then there’s a really good chance that you’re going to have a good, sustainable business, which happened to me.

There’s good search volume. And I get sales, you know, all the most, well, I would say almost every day. If not every day, already now, because I’m not really checking if we’re making it every day. But I do see the emails often that we made a sale. And yeah, you know, I’m not paying anything for that. No ads, we don’t post on social media. There is no leg work that we’re doing. People are just ordering passively because we rank very well for those keywords.

How do you maintain a steady pipeline of customers?

Well I just shared with you my secret, SEO. So people are searching every day. You don’t need to force them to search. They just search. And when you’re number one, number two, number three, they find you, they click your website, you just make a sale passively. That’s how I do it. That’s how we do it for our clients as well. People search. That’s the trend now.

I mean a lot of people, especially millennials, sometimes when we have problems in our life, like love life or depression, we don’t even ask our parents anymore. They’re not the first people we ask. We don’t even ask our friends anymore sometimes. They’re also not the first people we ask. It’s a sad thing for me to say this, but a lot of people actually ask Google first. We ask Google first. What do I do when I’m depressed? What should I do?

I sprained my ankle today. I sprained my left ankle. It’s been a long while since I sprained my ankle. I think the last time was when I was playing basketball in college. But the first thing I did was not to ask people what to do. It’s to ask Google what to do. And we find ourselves in, you know, having a culture where we ask Google first. Ask Google first. And if we all know that’s true, then SEO just makes so much sense.

And this is why, you know, for aquascape.ph, it’s just all SEO. We don’t do social media marketing for it. We have a Facebook page for it, but if you go check it out right now, nothing really is happening there, because I told my people don’t post, don’t run ads. I don’t really want a huge influx of orders. I don’t want that to happen. I just want a steady stream of continuous orders and that’s it.

What are the best ways to market your products and services?

I use SEO. Social media marketing works as well, but it depends on the product and service. I’d say a lot of actually, a lot of people in the aquascaping hobby actually use Facebook. They sell on Facebook. Even the livestock like assassin snails, the guppies, the shrimps, the plants, they actually sell on Facebook. And I would say, they’re doing well. I would say, they’re able to sell. It’s just not for me to keep on going to Facebook and posting and, oh man, I don’t like doing all of that every day or every so often. It’s not for me.

I’d rather just people come in, they order, we serve them by shipping out to them, and that’s it. That’s how I like things done. Also, when you post on Facebook you receive lots of questions, sometimes there are lots of influx in orders. I can’t really serve if there is an influx with the orders, because I’m just one man growing all of these things in my backyard. It’s not like I have a farm. And so it doesn’t serve me well to have an influx of them. That’s why the search really makes a lot of sense for me.

It would depend on how well you structure your operations. So if you try to sell a lot, but you can’t really serve them when they’re actually inquiring and buying from you, that’s going to be bad for your branding. So that’s also one big reason why we don’t sell on Facebook and we’d rather sell via SEO. So, yeah.

But for me right now, it’s digital marketing. I mean, people are on their smartphones every day. The first thing you probably pick up and the last thing you probably put down is your smartphone. Nothing else. I mean, there’s nothing else that you consistently pick up first thing and put down last thing except for your smartphone. So if that’s the truth, then we can conclude easily that people are on digital every day. People are connected to the internet every day. And if they’re connected to the internet every day, then that’s your target.

Marketing is all about aiming where your target is and shooting there. Everything else is a miss. If you aim and shoot where your market is not, you’re just wasting marketing budget and advertising budget. So since we can conclude that people are on digital every day, then one of the best ways and cheapest ways to actually market and advertise is digital. And people and companies who have been ahead of the curve in doing this are actually reaping a ton of things right now, now that we are in the pandemic and traditional marketing is not working as well as it used to.

From Janine. How do you manage business finances?

When I was starting out, it was an Excel file. That’s it. So everything that I was making, I’d put there. Everything that I was spending on, I’d also put there. So at the end of the month, I know how much money I made and how much money I spent and what’s my net profit. It’s not that hard for my business because we are a services based business. So our expenses would mostly be payroll.

Unlike if you’re an inventory trading business, you have a lot of stocks, items, you keep on buying and selling them throughout the month, it gets a little bit more complicated. So with that, you might want to use an app. You know, we have so many inventory management apps out there, but if you’re just starting out, Excel does really fine, you know. I have nothing against Excel.

When we were growing, actually up to today, I still have that Excel file and I still use it as a big picture perspective of what’s happening in my cash flow, money coming in, money going out, but it’s not nitty gritty anymore. The one who really tracks the nitty gritty would be my wife. All of the receipts go through her. And we collect a lot of receipts also, and we pass that onto the admin. So the finance right now looks a lot more complicated because a lot more people are involved with the payroll. The HR is involved as well with checking the time in time out. And so it gets a little bit more complicated.

But I’m not going to make it complicated for you because I really didn’t drop it all at once. We did it step by step. We started from the Excel file and tracked whatever we can track at the beginning and then grew from there. We made it a little bit more sophisticated when the need arose and that’s how it’s probably going to be for you as well.