Connor Hoyt | Profile

As a business owner and operator you have to do whatever it takes to not damage your reputation. You can spend your whole career generating goodwill and excellent public relations but it can all be taken away in one day if you make a critical mistake.

For most small businesses a platform such as Wix can allow you to have a beautiful website published in a matter of hours. Shopify is a good platform for E-Commerce as well. With their free trials there is no reason to spend more than you need to build an online presence. Now getting people to actually find your website (and therefore your offerings) is the real challenge.

If you find a restaurant going out of business you could buy it at a good discount. Then you remodel, re-brand, and build a new operation. Of course you want to conduct a good market research campaign to make sure you understand what the market wants. For marketing and promotions I’d say social media advertising is a good option to increase awareness and capture market share.

If you’re business has low enough revenue where you can’t sustain yourself definitely don’t hire employees yet. What you need is a business partner who can wear the “hats” you need for the different jobs in the startup environment of a new business. For example: One business partner knows the new product/service and how to sell it and the other partner does all of the accounting, finance, legal and so on. If you can’t pay people you can still promise rewards such as ownership in the new business.