While being a small business in a sea of larger competitors can put you at an automatic disadvantage, the good news is that there is plenty of help available for those in your position.

Finding reliable ways of keeping yourself going when it feels as though you’re out of options can do a lot for your brand. Not only does it help in the obvious way of bringing in more money and keeping your business going, but it can also help reduce the amount of stress that you’re feeling in the moment – offering comfort through showcasing a plethora of routes you didn’t know were even there.

1.   Consider Your Loan Options

For many businesses that are in the early days of their brand, they might be more reliant on loans than they would like to be. It’s important to understand that this won’t always be the case, but this kind of assistance can be transformative in the early days. With that in mind, however, you have to be careful to be thorough when reading the conditions for any given loan. While certain options might look the most appealing, to begin with, you don’t want to put yourself in a position further down the line where you’re regretting not going for a different one.

2.   The Balance of Outsourcing

The option of outsourcing can often help smaller businesses like yours gain a foothold in higher levels of quality by offloading work to professionals. The difficulty here might come in the initial fees, but even that might ultimately prove to be less expensive than the costs involved with hiring someone to do the same work in-house. That means that it’s all about finding a balance. You won’t be able to outsource everything, so consider what’s most important to your brand right now. Do you need a marketing boost or a one-off job, or do you need something more departmental? An outsourced HR dept can be exceptionally useful to businesses because of how much help it’s able to offer in the process of hiring and managing staff.

3.   Your Working Structure

The early days of business might see you trying to catch up with your competition as quickly as possible, but consider all of the things that you can do differently. Do you need an office straight away, for example? With remote working being as prominent an option in the modern world as it is, this could be a good opportunity to jump on this particular bandwagon. While this would allow you to save the money that you would otherwise spend on an office, it also means that you can advertise yourself as a business capable of offering your employees a better work/life balance, drawing more applicants towards you. That is useful because with a remote structure, you’ll be able to hire from anywhere – not just your local area.

4.   Establish Your Audience

One of the most important aspects of your market research will be establishing exactly who your product or service is geared towards. This is invaluable information because while you might want to enrapture the attention of as many people as possible, such a scattershot approach risks your brand coming off as generic and lacking in purpose. Knowing who you’re intended for can lead to a much more robust set of marketing campaigns, and it also means that you can begin to carve out exactly what makes your brand different from the scores of others in your industry. Designing yourself as a brand with someone in mind can give you a much greater definition and personality, factors that are essential for brand recognition.

5.   Listen to Your Audience

Once you have this audience, the all-important next step is to listen to what they have to tell you. Customer feedback can be an incredibly valuable resource, both in terms of what insights it can offer and what it means to your customers to give it in the first place. This is a chance to find out more about your business from the other side and better understand what it is that you can do better and where it is that you excel. These might be insights that you can also gather by looking at your market data, but this kind of qualitative data is just as important – if not more so. Furthermore, by giving your audiences a chance to tell you what is and isn’t working for them, you’re showcasing how important and valuable those opinions are to you, which can help to endear your brand to them.