The importance of hitting the ground running

The launch and initial few months of your HR consultancy are undoubtedly the hardest and perhaps the most important. At the beginning you will probably have no clients, and will be dealing with the pressure of wanting to start generating an income as soon as possible, as well as having to navigate the myriad of factors involved in running your own business, many of which you may have had little or no previous experience of, such as finance, marketing, branding and pricing.

It’s a steep learning curve, and easy to get things wrong, through lack of experience, insufficient knowledge in the various areas of running a business, or through lack of confidence. Whilst you’re dealing with all these things, you are also making your first impression on the people you come across in the course of running your business.

What you frequently see with new business owners (of any kind, not just HR consultants) is a development in what they do and how they do it over the first few months. It’s really common to see changes in business name, different branding, alterations to websites, new products, changing prices and different approaches to marketing.

Whilst these changes are often for good reasons, due to the business owner learning from their mistakes or acquiring better knowledge of their market, it means those first few months have not been as effective as they could have been. They’ve not hit the ground running and although they may have got there in the end, their business effectiveness and income will certainly have been impacted.

I absolutely include myself in that – while the business name did not change, certainly the products and services face2faceHR offered, the branding and my approach to marketing all changed in the first 18 months after I launched the business. I had found out which marketing activities worked and which didn’t, had taken proper professional advice on branding, understood my market much better and knew how to appeal to potential clients and get them to buy from me.

It drove home to me the vital importance of hitting the ground running. You don’t get to launch your business twice, and make a second first impression on key contacts, potential referrers and potential clients, and it’s the main reason I franchised the business in the first place. I felt passionately that I wanted to help HR professionals just like me to make a success of their business much sooner than I did myself, to help them bypass all the mistakes I made, give them a step up the learning curve and enable them to launch their businesses with confidence, hitting the ground running and making sure the initial tough period is made a bit easier, and the length of time without predictable income reduced.

 

If you’re considering launching your own HR consultancy business this year, now’s the time to have a chat with us if you’d like to consider doing it as part of the face2faceHR team.