Going into to business for yourself can be a seriously difficult and daunting experience. One of the biggest roadblocks that a lot of people find is that they don’t feel as though they should be occupying the same space as a lot of larger, more established business. It can sometimes feel like you’re an amateur surrounded by a whole bunch of professionals. But here’s the thing, you are a professional. Your business may be small, you may, in fact, be the only person involved in it. But that doesn’t make it any less legitimate than any other. If you have a product or service to provide, and you truly believe in it, then there’s nothing to stop you occupying the same marketplace as bigger businesses. Fortunately, it’s never been easier to put your business forward as a legitimate company. Modern technology has made a huge amount of different in allowing small business to appear far bigger than they are. This way, even if you’re just running your business out of your home, clients and customers are more likely to consider it to be worth their time. Here are just a few ways that technology can make your business seem like the real deal.
Web design
Customers rely on visual information to make a lot of their decisions about a company. That might seem shallow, but it’s really just an inevitable part of human nature. That means that if a part of your business looks amateurish or cheap, then that’s going to reflect very poorly on every other part of your business. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in your website. It honestly doesn’t matter if you have the best, most professional product on the market, if your website looks cheap, dated and poorly designed, customers are going to assume the rest of your business is exactly the same. The best thing that you can do is to make sure that you’re looking very carefully at how some of the world’s most successful businesses design and present their websites. Look at any trends that seem to go between them and see what you can incorporate them into your own web design. The good new is that there are plenty of services available that provide easy to use web templates that will help you create an incredibly slick, professional looking site without needing to learn a single bit of code.
A virtual office
One of the biggest things that can make your business seem amateurish is the moment when a client or customer realizes that the office address is clearly a residential property. As unfair as it might be, the idea of a business that is run from someone’s home will inevitably be considered less valid than one that is run from an office space. A virtual office is a great way to circumvent this problem. By presenting your business in this more “legitimate” way, you create a greater sense of trust from your customers. Plenty of virtual office services include a reliable mail forwarding address provider that allows you to receive all correspondence from clients without having to “give the game away” that your business is being run from your garage. It might not be fair, but being able to present your business in this way will make a huge amount of difference to making it look more established and professional.
Business email accounts
This follows a similar idea to the previous point. Your Gmail or Yahoo account might work perfectly well, but it’s going to send a very clear message to clients and customers that you aren’t necessarily someone who they should take that seriously. When you’re emailing customers, you want your branding to be entirely consistent. By using a dedicated email address that includes your domain name, you tell the world that your business is serious. It’s a subtle change but it really can make a huge amount of difference. This is especially true if there’s more than one person in the business. This way you can have separate email addresses that all have the same domain and branding. This consistency is incredibly important if you want your business to be taken seriously. There are plenty of services available form companies like Microsoft and Google that allow you to create these email accounts. These services are effective, reliable and really will make a big difference to the perception of your business as a whole.