Autonomy is perhaps one of the main reasons as to why you were interested in opening a business. It might not be the sole reason, but it will certainly crop up if you were asked to write a list of motivators that set you on this path. You need to feel free to begin the work you most want to do, and give yourself the space to push forward and develop in the best way possible. It might be that you were sick of the corporate world, and decided to branch out to do things differently. You might have thought past jobs were stifling your creative freedom, or that you’ve finally realized that your skills are more than enough to run your own firm, and that you could potentially make much more money due to this effort than you would even running a department at your old job.

There is a temptation to try to be as autonomous as possible when starting a business. By that we mean it’s very interesting to see how we can do things, how we can disregard the formula of success, and potentially find innovative ways of working with the market. Finding more autonomy in your small business effort can sometimes veer you away from the path of success if you push too hard – as market research among many other things cannot simply be dictated the way you want it to be.

However, there are many methods you can take to exercise more control over your offering, and hopefully this can have a major impact on the life of your firm. You should consider:

Branding

Branding is important to consider. While you must always respect the creativity of those you have enlisted or outsourced to try and market with, it can usually be extremely helpful to develop the means of branding from your own vision, trying to figure out how to best emphasize the intention you have for the company rather than worry about the best or most formal way of going about things. Consider adapting to the market, but also focus on what makes your brand stand out. Just because other law firms use their logo as the name of the firm, there’s no reason as to why you shouldn’t consider branding yourself using a specialist logo that you hope to forge into something of familiarity.

Branding is essential to get right, but be sure that you strike a balance between your intent, and what the outsourced marketing team is suggesting to you. Also, never be afraid to rebrand. You should be able to have the final say over what package your business comes in, provided you make this choice with confidence and wisdom. This is how you can feel proud of a business, and always consider it to be yours, with your fingerprints stamped upon it from its inception.

Documents

The documents you decide to design and use as your business standard are important. It’s essential to use some form of service that allows you to uniformly apply a template, so that you and your staff always have a reserve of uniform letters to access, tailor and send. This heightens the professionalism you are seen to have, allows you to have finer control over all of the correspondence your business takes into account on a general day, and helps you avoid making mistakes.

However, there are other forms that you do not generate yourself in which you might be able to exercise a degree of reporting control. For example, using manual tax forms can be much more freeing, easy to calculate with and less hassle than the generated software options, and can provide you with the means to include much more detail and when submitting a claim. For that reason, we’d recommend you tailor your income tax forms in this fashion, so long as you have them verified by your accountant.

Social Media

Stay active with your social media pages. Social media pages are now the first place that many new and interested customers or clients will look towards when trying to interface with your firm, which can seem like a sad scenario given the investment you might have put into your website. However, this entire cohesive package is important to steward, and can give you the best results in the long term.

It’s also essential to consider how you might market these social media pages. From the use of paid, targeted promotion to hiring SEO companies to flood your affiliate links in competent content, it’s essential to know that your social media tendrils should travel far and reach deep into the ground via each of these platforms. But how are you to find more autonomy running these pages? Well, first control them yourself, or at least before you can hire a social media manager. Next, celebrate your firm using it! Consider employee spotlights to celebrate those in your firm, or potentially run promotions through them, or post pictures and tag new developments in your firm that you’re proud of.

For example, you might picture your team together on a social night and upload it, or photograph a flattering picture of a new product you’ve just ordered in, among a range of important things that well-hashtagged are sure to get likes. Be sure to pay attention to your analytics because here you can generally get the full scope of the post engagement, and figure out just how well your methods are working.

Selling Strategies

How are your selling strategies to work? Are you to get customers excited about your product? Are you to try and stay an innovator with quality above all? Do you value the customer above all else and hope to retain them through great treatment? Are you going to be subscription based or not? Consider how you might switch up the lens of selling, even if you’re the only one to think that way in your industry, because you never know just when an innovation can help your firm transition to the next level.

With these simple tidbits of advice, finding more autonomy in your small business efforts can influence your decision making for the better.