Partner Article

Cooking up a fruitful tech business: The key ingredients to achieving start-up success

Henk Koopmans, CMO at Plextek Consulting, shares his expert advice on the best ways for SMEs to get their product to market.

I believe there are three ingredients that are crucial to preparing a successful start-up business.

The first piece you should throw into your simmering, start-up saucepan, is access to finance. Whether you’re using your own money or finance sought through begging and borrowing from friends or family, it really doesn’t matter.

You need cash to kick things off and then no doubt some more to keep it going.

Next, it’s time to think about access to market. If you can’t find a suitable market for your product, then you really don’t have a business! Chuck this next piece into your almost boiling pot once you can identify it.

Finally, to really get the business steaming, you’ll need the right abilities.

Delivery skills are vital to get the product in the hands of your customers, and although technical skills and commercial skills are pretty standard requirements when creating a working product, it’s the delivery skills that are crucial to commercial success.

Don’t let these points escape your mind when visiting potential investors.

They’re not going to be as enthusiastic as you are about your product, that’s a given! But what they really do want to see (and where many naive entrants to the Dragon’s Den have failed) is a return on their investment.

Start-ups that can offer a credible and reliable delivery plan will encourage a sense of confidence in their investors, who will be far more likely to take a chance on the business and start-up product.

For true success, the real trick is to have the right mentality from the very start of your journey. This means you MUST think about the cost, delivery and your customer’s experience.

So here are some important points to consider when you begin to cook up this accomplishment:

• Cost consideration: This will have a direct relation on your profit after all! The cost of your product also determines how you design it, the pieces used for it and the sales strategy. It’s not something you can sweep under the carpet or think about after the product’s finished.
• Multitude of manufacturing: Putting one product together yourself is lovely…but what would happen if you needed to suddenly crank up your rate of production? Could you find a manufacturer that’s capable of taking on your product?
• Keeping up the components: Take it from me; you won’t be able to afford to design a product if key components become unexpectedly unavailable. Your product will disappear along with your business, so bear this in mind when thinking about its future and lifespan.

There will be other things to consider along the way, but it’s mostly about stirring the right ingredients together from the very beginning. Trying to weigh up these issues further down the line will be much harder!

But have you really got what it takes?

You could attempt the manufacturing yourself by roping in the right staff and equipment. That sounds easy, right?

But ask yourself how much value this really adds to your business when compared to the money you’d invest to do this.

You could outsource your manufacturing, but it’s not as straightforward as just dumping this responsibility on someone else. You’ll still need to have some product engineering and manufacturing expertise rooted into your business, and as a start-up you could struggle to find someone that’s willing to manufacture at the cost and volume you’d hoped for.

There is a third way. As well as being very cost efficient and flexible, it allows control of the product and business strategy to stay firmly in your hands.

Don’t go through it alone

If you’re feeling a little pessimistic after my words of warning, your knight in shining armour could arrive in the form of a design and manufacturing partner.

These guys will stop you from ‘over-complicating’ your product, plus, can easily accommodate different production volumes with real life business skills, saving you a lot of headaches.

Many businesses that are burnt by the start-up flame have found that everything takes much longer than expected, they run out of cash or miss the market window. A design and manufacturing partner, such as Plextek, are there to make sure this doesn’t happen. They’ll take the concept and make sure the focus is on producing a product that’s totally fit-for-market.

Ultimately this is just a slightly different take on how a start-up can take a concept down the path of success. We all know that two businesses are never the same; just as no two products would have the same approach during production.

But developing a strong delivery plan for both you and your investors, will help you on the way to cooking up that fruitful start-up business you’ve been craving.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Plextek .