Determining a business location is perhaps the most important consideration to make when starting your business.
When choosing the business location for a new business you must consider the need to minimize fixed costs. When finance is limited, it is very important to try to keep the break-even level of output – the output level that earns enough revenue to cover all costs – as low as possible.
This will greatly increase the business’s chances of survival.
There are many factors to consider when making a business location decision. Should you rent an office in the city center or work from home?
Perhaps, the easiest way to make this decision is considering what type of business you run and where your customers are.
Let’s discuss some business location scenarios, shall we?
Business location based on whether you provide a product or a service?
Whether you provide a product or a service plays an important role in choosing a business location. Translating documents as a service does not require you to have a big shop on the main at the most prestigious street. It could be a small office on second floor in an alley behind a pizza hut joint.
Selling customized tours might require you to have your shop on the main street in the most touristic area in town, which is a great business location, but very expensive too.
Selling designer clothes maybe means your business location should be inside a luxurious mall.
Providing services or products plays an important role in your business location decision-making process given that you have enough funds to do so.
Putting your business on Google maps can go a long way to help you get discovered, this article will help.
How innovative is your product?
Designing and building a new product from scratch that has never been built before is one of the ways to stand out from the crowd. It sure involves a lot of challenges along the way as to how to come up with ideas and what skills are required. After building the product, you need to decide where to display it, and here comes the business location decision dilemma.
Let’s imagine you built a product that converts regular combustion engine cars into electric cars. Cool, huh? With such products, customers would like to see it, test it, and get information before buying it.
So maybe your business location should be a big shop window on the main street.
Business location based on who are your customers?
Another important factor to take into consideration is your customers. Starting a travel agency in the suburbs to sell to tourists visiting your country may not be the wisest idea. You need to be where the action is.
A website can help you reach where your physical shop can’t
Operating from home is the most common way for entrepreneurs to establish their business. This has the great advantage of keeping costs low and all you need is an internet connection.
Having a website that displays your products and/or services can go a long way helping you reduce your costs.
Going back to our previous examples:
- Translating documents can now be done fully electronically. You could work from home, receive documents to your email, communicate with customers over chat, send the translated documents their way by email, and have the payment wired to your bank account and issue an electronic invoice as well.
All you have to do is build a website that lists your services, promote it well and make your home your business location area of choice.
- A travel agency that sells customized tours can also be operated online. Build a website, display your tours, design attractive images and videos, keep communication effective with customers, and promote your business well. This way, your business location could be anywhere, and you could move to the busy touristic area once you’ve managed to collect more funds.
- For selling designer clothes, of course, a store is vital, but this only makes owning an online store more important. Customers may want to see the collections online and then go to the physical store to try them on and buy them. Current and loyal customers may even want to buy directly off your E-store.
- Innovative products like the conversion tool that converts combustion engine cars into electric is one that surely needs a physical store. However, a website displaying the mechanism, waiting period, costs, specifications, models, and the features is also vital to let customers know about your service.
That’s a wrap.
Deciding your business location in the physical world is one of the most important decisions to make for your business. On the one hand, you need to be where your customers want your product, on the other hand, you need to lower your fixed costs to survive.
Whatever business location decision you end up making, a website is a must for every business. It is a statement saying, “I exist even though I am not here physically.”
