Top 5 tips when starting a small B2B creative agency or freelance business

As a small business owner I know how difficult it can be to successfully start-up and build a B2B design business.  I’ve learned a lot in the last five years and I wanted to share some of the more pertinent things with people in a similar position.

While not an exhaustive list, they are certainly start-up tips that I would have been grateful for.

1. Be Honest

Honesty is at the root of every good business relationship. In order to land, keep and develop a design client into an ongoing account you need to be honest about quality, ability, pricing, timescales and volume upfront. Being honest with a client allows you to manage their expectations throughout the delivery process. It also means you may lose the occasional job if you are brutally honest about your design ability and capacity but in the long run by developing a reputation for honesty clients are more likely to come back and ask you again, knowing they will get a truthful quote and answer.

2. Respond Fast

We live in a 24/7 society. People are online and connected to email and social networks by a mind boggling array of electronic devices. Old excuses like “I didn’t get the email” or “I was out of the office” simply do not cut it.  You may not be working for an employer any more but essentially if someone is paying you to do something, they are your boss – for the moment at least. Therefore, if your boss/client sends you an email or calls you, you need to answer them quickly, professionally and efficiently.

3. People are your biggest asset

There is an old, but still very relevant saying that people buy from people. As a freelancer you need to develop a whole host of relationships in order to keep your B2B business functioning. Be they with clients, with other providers or with suppliers, the relationships you develop will reflect the quality of your business.

As a freelancer your biggest asset is your reputation. You get your reputation not only from physical design work delivered but from how you interact with those you come into contact with. The way I look at it is if a pitch for business comes down between you and another provider, and there is very little to choose between the two of you, clients will go for the provider they like. Give them another reason to hire you by being the one they can see themselves working with.

4. Cash Flow

The ideal cash flow model for any start-up business is to get the money in as quickly as possible and hold on to it for as long as you can. Where start-ups tend to fall down is trying to balance the need for incoming funds with the demands – sometimes red bill demands – of the outgoing.

As you begin to build your B2B design business you will be able to negotiate better terms and conditions. These may include staggered payments for delivered work rather than waiting until completion to invoice.

Likewise with your own suppliers, as you build a reputation as someone who pays their bill on time, you may be able to negotiate looser terms that allow you to hold onto cash for longer.

Cash flow in a B2B start-up is not something that you think about when you sit down with a sheet of blank paper trying to plan what shape your business will take, but with a family and mortgage the need to have a steady income each month becomes fairly acute.

5. Get a good accountant

Asking why you need an accountant to do your accounts when it is so easy to do it yourself online, is the same nonsense argument people use when pondering the value of hiring a B2B design agency versus using Microsoft to design a logo. Bottom line – professionals know what they are doing. You get a service from a professional accountant – and a professional B2B design agency for that matter – that you cannot match just because you can use an Excel spreadsheet or Microsoft Paint.

Death and Taxes might be inevitable but while you wait for one, you need a good accountant to help you through the quagmire of the other. As a start-up and as a B2B business that runs almost exclusively from home (apart from a few well placed Starbucks research days) you may be entitled to a tax break on your outgoings from some of your earnings.

Accountants for small start-up businesses are fairly inexpensive and as a contractor report to you on time, or Tax deadline.

Starting a small B2B design agency is not an easy ride but it is rewarding. By taking advice from people like me who have experienced the bumps in the road already, you can at least begin to smooth out the terrain ahead.