Top 5 Business Lessons for Starting and Staying Lean

5/24/2018

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Many successful businesses start out with funding -- from a bank, from investors or even from personal savings. My business was not like that. I was young, so I only had a few months of savings in my bank account and when I researched the loan process at my bank, it just seemed too daunting. To me, it made more sense to self-fund because I knew I would always have complete control of my company and wouldn't have to answer to anyone but my customers. However, that presented its own challenge. Like I mentioned, I didn't have a lot of money to spend. So I went the lean route. And the lessons I learned still guide our business today.

Get out your Minimal Viable Product ASAP. It’s tempting to spend time perfecting your product prior to launch. But it’s extremely valuable to be one of the first to market in your industry. And by starting small you’ll be able to create new iterations of your product faster. By using a soft launch strategy and starting with low volume, you’ll also be able to gather valuable customer feedback and adjust your product and services based on lessons learned. We originally intended to create mobile device charging stations for bars and restaurants, before realizing event planners were dying to get their hands on them. You might find that your product fits a niche that you hadn’t even previously thought of!
Be flexible and go where your product takes you. When I started InCharged, I thought I was going to sell these units to bar and restaurant owners so they could make additional revenue by selling ad space on the screen. However, I quickly realized that they wanted me to install them for free and manage the media sales myself -- not exactly the business I wanted to get into. At the same time, I was also starting to get a lot of inquiries from event planners who wanted to offer rent charging stations for their guests. So instead of fighting a losing battle of selling my product to users who didn’t immediately see the value, I pivoted and began to create a whole new suite of products for event planners who actually wanted to pay for our technology.
Embrace failure. I was mortified to make mistakes when we were just starting out. But in retrospect, I’m so glad we learned from them because it allowed us to avoid more costly errors in the future. For example, we had no idea how to ship our product and were spending a lot of resources on repairs and replacements. But it was actually much easier to make repairs on our initial few prototypes than it would have been if we had waited to make those mistakes until we had a higher volume of business. We learned the importance of packaging early on and we still use those lessons today.
Listen to your clients. As a business owner, you can learn a lot from your customers. You simply have to ask. Not only do these conversations strengthen your business relationships, but you can gain valuable insight into how to improve your product, new features your customers want to see and how to improve the overall customer experience. To sweeten the deal, we often send a small gift afterward to show our appreciation.
Keep your overhead low. Everyone wants a glamorous corner office. But as a startup, that’s rarely the best way to invest your money. Our first office was a tiny room in a trucking warehouse that we bartered for and then we moved into a small office space that was still very affordable. Even now, our loft warehouse is in an up-and-coming area rather than in the heart of a big city. By keeping our overhead low, we’ve been able to allocate more funds to invest in business growth.

In the 10 years since we launched, we've come a long way -- but we still operate on a lean business model. Our scale is much larger, but the principles still apply: Keeping our operations streamlined gives us the flexibility to develop and roll out new products quickly, efficiently adjust our service offerings based on customer feedback, keep our pricing competitive and continue to innovate in a constantly changing market.

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