Please note that this article is intended for educational purposes only and should not be deemed to be or used as legal, employment, or health & safety advice. For guidance or advice specific to your business, consult with a qualified professional.

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Intro to Running a Business

Starting a business is no small feat. But running it is when the real fun begins. This guide walks you through the basics of running a business, covering everything from managing your finances to planning your marketing efforts and hiring employees.

Table of contents

• FAQ
• Make sure you have a solid foundation
• Set yourself up to accept payments
• Finances, accounting, and taxes
• Marketing
• Hiring and managing employees
• Use technology to streamline
• Mine your data

FAQ

Five Frequently Asked Questions About Running a Business

Starting a business is the first step. Running it is the next adventure. Regardless of your industry you’ll be thinking about the following questions.

How can I start accepting payments?

To start accepting payments, you need a processing device. It makes sense to purchase an affordable credit card reader that also takes chip and PIN cards and contactless payments. It’s incredibly easy and affordable for even the smallest of pop-up businesses to get equipped to accept card payments. Square Reader is a tiny, low cost device that allows you to take card, contactless and mobile device payments. Square Terminal adds extra functionality and prints receipts.

How should I manage accounting?

To manage accounting, make a budget and a long-term financial plan that you can stick to. You should also run regular reports that detail your income, balance and cash flow. It may make sense to consult with a professional accountant.

Learn more in our guide to small business accounting

How should I market my business?

Depending on your budget, there are several ways to market your business, including email marketing, social media, traditional advertising and participating in events.

Check out our tailored guide on how to create a marketing strategy for your small business.

How should I approach hiring?

If you find that you’re unable to keep up with day-to-day operations, it’s time to hire employees. You can find good candidates through referrals, job posting sites or local institutions like colleges and universities. When you bring someone on board, make sure you understand how to comply with any employment laws that may apply to you.

What technology will help me run my business?

In addition to a secure payments processor, you can streamline your operations using a variety of software. There are affordable tools to help you manage stock/inventory, employee schedules, payroll and invoicing.

A basic website and online store is a must for all small businesses. With the right provider, it doesn’t require any technical skill to set up and run. You can make an online store for free in minutes and see it start helping you to increase sales right away.

A point of sale system that allows you to keep track of customer preferences, staff hours and stock levels all in one place is a huge time saver and makes everything run smoothly.

Allowing your customers to treat friends and family to what your business offers via a gift card scheme is another huge sales opportunity. Consider a solution that allows you to provide digital and physical gift cards such as Square Gift Cards.

What do you need to run a business? Number one: a solid foundation

To run a business smoothly, you need a solid foundation. First and foremost, that means you have a business plan in place that serves as a blueprint for both you and any potential investors you may want to tap for financing. If you don’t have one already, now is the time to create a business plan. The sections you should aim to include are an executive summary, a business description, market analysis, competitive analysis, service and product line, operations and management and financial considerations. It’s a more formal version of a business checklist. With a plan in place, running your business from day to day is a whole lot easier and less scattered. Long-term success is dependent on a strong business plan.

To avoid any derailing issues, you should also take some time to make sure you’re good to go with all your legal and tax obligations as a small business. It’s a good idea to consult with a reputable lawyer and accountant to ensure you’re not missing anything and are filing everything on time.

You’ll also want to make sure that you’ve taken care of all the permits or fees that are required to do business in your city. You don’t want any future surprises that could eat up your budget. Ensuring you have all these things set will save you both minor and major headaches that take you away from running your business.

Set yourself up to accept payments

It should be as easy as possible for you and your staff to complete customer sales. That means you should be accepting credit and debit cards. Why? For starters, statistics show that people are using cash less and less. So, sending people to the nearest cashpoint if they don’t have enough cash on hand is not the best customer experience. Plus, accepting credit cards can help you make more sales and improve your cash flow.

There’s really no reason not to with such low cost, simple card payment devices as Square Reader available. It is affordable to even the smallest of businesses. You can buy it for £19 + VAT and run it with a free app downloaded to your phone.

If you want to future-proof, Square Terminal is one step up from Square Reader and provides a more powerful all-in-one card machine that prints receipts and has a screen for customers to enter their pin if they don’t want to use contactless.

You should also be looking to the future here. Will your payments processing device grow with your business and keep you current with the latest in secure payments technologies? Toward that end, get a card reader that can accept contactless cards as well chip and PIN.

If you’re looking for a more powerful payment solution, an all-in-one POS till can provide a seamless experience in being able to easily accept payments, use customisable point-of-sale software and manage online sales.

How to run your business finances, accounting and taxes

Blanket statement: You need to keep your finances in order. For starters, that means you’ve done the legwork (or worked with a reputable accountant) to understand all your tax obligations, operating costs and how much money you need to bring in each month and quarter to break even—and become profitable.

When it comes to taxes, make sure you’re filing everything correctly and on time. The gov.uk website has an entire section of its website dedicated to the ins and outs of your business tax obligations — it’s a good idea to spend some time there to make sure you understand how to comply.

You may also be able to claim expenses on different items or services used by your small company or be eligible for tax relief, so make sure to discuss these possibilities with your accountant.

Now on to accounting reports. At a minimum, there are three key reports you should be keeping. The first is your income statement, which details how much money your business has made or lost over a period of time. It generally has three parts: total revenue, total expenses and net income. The hope is that revenue is greater than expenses, resulting in a positive net income.

The second is a balance sheet, which provides a snapshot of your business’s financial position at any point in time. This report also typically has three sections: assets, liabilities and equity. The value of assets should equal the combined value of liabilities and equity.

And lastly, you should keep a cash flow statement, which highlights how much money has moved in and out of your business in a given period of time. It, too, is made up of three sections: cash flow from operations, investing and financing.

Payments are just the start

Square helps take care of the day-to-day stuff, too. From point of sale to payroll, we have all kinds of services to help you save time and run more smoothly.

You can hook up your Square account to a number of tools in Square App Marketplace (QuickBooks Online and Xero, for example) to help you stay on top of your bookkeeping. If you’re shooting in the dark on these things (or tackling finances for the first time), it may be a good idea to take a course on the basics of small business accounting and bookkeeping at a local college or online. If you have the budget, working with a reputable accountant is a great option.

Marketing your business

Without a steady stream of customers, you won’t have a business at all. So you need to employ some marketing strategies to get your business on people’s radar. There are many ways to approach marketing, and they run the gamut from grassroots tactics to more involved campaigns. An omnichannel approach – that gives thought to how all your marketing fits together — will ensure you never miss an opportunity and your customers always get a unified message about your business.

The best place to begin is with the stuff that’s low cost. Start with the community—often organic, word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective. Make an effort to be visible in your local area. That includes things like introducing yourself to fellow business owners, participating in any local events and asking to put up flyers in places where potential customers might be hanging out. If you have positive relationships with the people in your neighbourhood, they’re more likely to recommend your business to others.

Social media is another low-cost way to market your business. At the very least, you should get your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts up and running, and make sure that you’re posting at least a couple of times a week.

You can post things like announcements for events and sales, pictures of the products you’re offering or even fun things like famous quotes that relate to your business. Be sure to use hashtags and tag appropriate people in your posts, which increases the likelihood of getting more shares and likes. If you’re feeling stuck, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all have guides on how to use their platforms to market your business. Social media can helps businesses to grow.

And then there’s email marketing — a proven driver of sales for small businesses. Things like events, promotions and announcements are ripe for email marketing, as are holidays and changes in the season. If you’re a cake shop, for example, you could send an email letting your customers know about your Christmas offerings. If you’re a cleaning service, you could send a reminder that spring-cleaning time is just around the corner. Always be looking for opportunities to keep your business fresh in people’s minds with strategically timed email campaigns. Just remember, when emailing customers, it’s important to abide by the rules which regulate email marketing in the UK and to avoid spam. Marketing emails can only be sent to customers who have agreed to receive it.

If you’re running a retail business, check out our guide to omnichannel marketing for more useful tips.

Productive, motivated employees are the backbone of a solid business.

Hiring and managing employees

As an entrepreneur, there’s a tendency to want to do everything yourself. But if you’re finding yourself unable to keep up, it’s time to bring in some help. Hiring employees is not something to take on lightly. Many great leaders cite smart hiring as the key to their success. And as you grow, it becomes more and more important. With the right people in place, you’re able to scale. With the wrong people, you get stuck in your tracks. To make sure you’re being as strategic as possible when building your team, read our tips on how to interview for great employees.

Even if you’ve hired excellent people, you have to know how to manage them. Effective management is one of the most important skills for a small business owner. It’s a skill to be honed throughout a lifetime, but if you’re new at this, there are tonnes of resources out there to help you—from online classes to books (there are countless titles to choose from) and gov.uk’s dedicated portal.
Once you have a team in place you’ll want to ensure they’re properly onboarded, happy, well trained and well looked after. Team management software can help you to see when you need more staff and when your quieter times are, ensure shifts are easy to track for you and your team and allow you to run a digital clock-in, clock-out system.

Use technology to streamline

When you’re running your business, you should always be looking for areas where you could be more efficient. And if you’re doing everything manually, there’s a good chance there are a lot of things that fall into that category.

To figure out which area to prioritise first, think about the day-to-day tasks that eat up the most time. Is it ordering stock? Managing your employees’ schedules? Managing remote employees? If you find yourself spending more time than you’d like on any of these things, it’s time to search for some technology to help.

Luckily, if you sell with Square, we have a bounty of sophisticated tools to help you streamline your operations. If stock control is a problem, for example, you can set up inventory alerts in your Square Dashboard to be notified when things are running low. You can also hook up your Square account to a variety of inventory management tools in Square App Marketplace.

If invoicing is a constant hassle (a common gripe among many business owners), get set up with Square Invoices, which lets you easily send and track digital invoices right from your Dashboard. (Which means no more stacks of paper to sift through.)

Square makes managing and paying employees easy with tools like Square Team Management (which offers an easy way to keep track of time cards).

Whatever your time-sucks, there’s sure to be a technology out there that can help you reduce them. Check out what else Square offers and how it could help your business get time back.

The right tech will help you increase sales and grow. All businesses can benefit from being online and having a website. Having a digital presence helps to show that you are legitimate and trustworthy. It also means you’re always open. You can make sales and take orders even when your physical outlet is closed. You’ll also benefit by picking up sales from internet searches where customers may be looking for the products or services you sell, but not actively searching for your business.

You can set up a free online store in a few clicks and see digital orders and sales start mounting up.
You can also make the most of social media sales opportunities by creating pay buttons and links for people to buy directly from your posts with an online checkout solution. You can add similar buttons and links into e-newsletters and emails.

Mine your data

Another best friend as you’re running your business? Data. Being intimately familiar with how your business is going on a day-to-day basis is crucial to making informed decisions about how to run things. In your Square Dashboard, you can check all your sales data (across all your locations) and see which items are selling the best, which can help you plan your inventory. You can also see how many customers were new versus returning that day. This is all information you can access on the go, which means you can keep track of your business from anywhere.

Your Square Dashboard also has your historical sales information. This is particularly helpful when it comes to future planning. You can look at how business went last December, for example, to be strategic about what you want to do this December. You could re-up on your best-selling items from previous years or spot trends in your peak sales times to be smart about planning your hours and staffing.

How to excel in your industry

All of these steps will aid your business success, but you must also factor in your specific industry’s requirements in order to keep your business afloat.

The business strategy a restaurant owner implements will be different from a hairdresser’s approach. Understanding your industry’s pain points will help you better manage your business.

Knowing your customers, who they are, what they want and how you can help them is also key. Time invested in identifying your target market when you launch your business and regularly once it is up and running is always time well spent.

Thinking of ways to establish and maintain brand loyalty is also crucial.

By following these top tips on how to run a business you’ll be able to find your customers, communicate with them in the right way and keep them coming back time and time again to your business.