Why do you want to start a remote business — smaller upfront investments, flexible working hours, better hiring options, or an improved quality of life?
Remote businesses have numerous benefits over renting an office space; it’s an accessible path to profit and freedom. Almost anyone can make a remote business work with some small investments, will, and focus.
Keep reading to learn how to start a remote business and set up your team for success.
Related: Strategies to Maintain Work-Life Balance With Remote Work
How to Start a Remote Business in 4 Steps
While every startup will go about things a little differently, there are a few guidelines to follow for an easy and inexpensive launch. Follow these four steps to fast-track your remote business to success.
1. Create Your Business and Financial Plan
Every business, remote or not, needs a solid business plan. This plan can be short and concise or as long and detailed as you like; however, there are some must-haves.
Your business plan should include a vision for the future, i.e., your business goals and hopes. Write down what you want to achieve by starting a business and why you want to start a remote company.
Consider how working and hiring remotely will affect your personal success, financial returns, and overall lifestyle. Starting a remote business is a cost-effective option, but don’t forget to think about how it will impact hitting your goals.
Another section to include in your business plan is how you will structure your business. This part will vary based on your business model. Still, it should contain relevant information about the products or services you plan to offer, employees you need to hire, the equipment you have to buy, and inventory, fulfillment, and shipping needs if you plan to sell physical products.
While working on this section, look into state, federal, and international tax laws. In addition, if you plan to offer your products or services internationally, you’ll want to address how you’ll comply with privacy laws like GDPR.
Finally, it’s time to begin forming your financial plan. The first thing you want to determine is how you will measure success and set clear benchmarks and KPIs. This section will focus on your business’s financial investments and objectives, including sales targets, balance sheets, cash flow statements, startup costs, and funding sources.
2. Develop Your Marketing Plan
Ideally, when you start a remote business, you’ll already have a target audience in mind and an easy-to-understand solution to offer them. The easiest way to start is by marketing in a field you’re familiar with and using your knowledge in the industry to build a solid marketing plan.
After understanding your product-market fit, you’ll want to outline your target buyers and develop a plan to connect with them throughout your sales funnel. One key for remote businesses is knowing that keeping up with your customers’ expectations has to happen fast. So, you have to anticipate their wants and needs ahead of time to meet their requests ASAP.
Related: Hybrid Work: Challenges and Solutions
3. Assemble Your Team and Implement a Communication Plan
In the beginning, your remote business might have a single employee: You. Or maybe you’ll start with a small team. Either way, it’s crucial to determine who will help support your new company as your customer base starts growing.
Having a clear communication plan is the key to a successful business. Other than the obvious financial reasons, you want all of your remote employees to feel comfortable and confident in supporting your company — this is even more important than in physical office settings.
Scaling a remote business has unique challenges that stem from having a remote, distributed team. Communication takes more time and effort, particularly if you have employees spread across time zones. Resolving conflicts is also more difficult, meaning that hiring the right people is essential.
Set clear, transparent guidelines for how communication will work within your company — how do you handle emergencies? Do employees need to check in daily? What communication platforms work best for everyone?
As your remote business grows, things will start happening quickly, and you want to ensure you and your team hold each other accountable. Remote workers can feel isolated from their colleagues, which can impact their motivation and performance. Keeping everyone connected is a must.
How do you keep everyone connected and engaged when your team works from different locations? With the right digital platform — See how we can help your employees build more personal connections in the workplace.
4. Integrate the Right Tech Stack to Connect Your Team
You want to find the right tech stack for your remote business from the beginning. While business might start slow, it will likely pick up quickly — getting your team to adopt new tools on the fly isn’t easy.
The software you need will depend on the type of your business, your employees, and how you plan to run the day-to-day operations. However, there’s one piece of tech every remote business needs: Collaboration software that connects teams in real time.
For example, remote meetings often feel less interactive, and keeping everyone engaged is challenging. Video conferencing is an okay solution to this, but there are other options, like 3D tools that allow team members to co-locate from anywhere and have more immersive meetings.
Other than work-related communications, you want your team to feel connected to each other; they can’t really go out for happy hour when they’re located across the country or the globe. And no, playing a game together on Zoom every once in a while isn’t enough.
Virtual reality solutions that allow remote workers to meet up regularly, whether for work purposes or just for fun, are a fantastic way to eliminate meeting overload and isolation that’s prevalent in remote workspaces.
Related: Create An Effective Virtual Onboarding Experience
Better Remote Communication Starts With The Qube
Start your remote business off with the remote communication and collaboration platform that does more: The Qube.
We help companies break the boundaries of remote working by providing as close to an in-person experience as possible. You can create customized, branded virtual spaces for your employees to work and socialize in, facilitating better work relationships, productivity, and success.
Want to see how the right collaboration software can bring you and your team together from anywhere? Schedule your free demo and add social interactions back into your remote workplace.
