Business Start Up Singapore – 8 Must Know Secrets for Your New Venture

Business Start Up Singapore – Are you looking to startup your new venture or business in Singapore?  This article will share 8 must know secrets for your new venture in Singapore.

 The Straits Times has reported on 10 Oct 2019, that:

“Singapore was ranked as the world’s most competitive economy for 2019 and Singapore was also No. 1 for two of the index’s other pillars – citizens’ healthy life expectancy years and labour markets.” 

We hope that our 8 tips here would prove useful in your journey in entrepreneurship in Singapore in these times.

1. Team Formation for your new Business Start Up in Singapore

When building a team for your new business, always spend a lot of time focused on initial team formation as it would be the key when the going gets tough.  Based on many experienced entrepreneurs, the key is to have a diversified team in terms of skills sets.  For example, one should be good at the big picture/creativity, another good at operations and a third at business development/sales and marketing.

• Business Model

I am sure you have heard many people say to you that business is highly competitive and the market is narrow and there are many established players in your field of business.  All these pieces of advice are well and good for a budding entrepreneur, but one needs to sit down quietly and think through what is going to be your business model (i.e. how will you provide your goods or service and how you will make money from that). 

How will you make money for providing your service?  Think through all the way from the buying of your goods to the delivery of the goods and billing and collection of money.  Do you have any innovative way to deliver your product or service?  That is the hallmark and differentiating factor when people visit your website/business and do business with you.

Sometimes, you can go after a niche area of your industry and establish that you are the best in that niche.  Do remember to let your clients/customers know what you are best in.  This should come out in your marketing efforts/email signatures.

• Capital structure

Excess money is the key to relationships breaking down in a business.  As a founder of a business of a startup in Singapore you should always enter into a founders agreement or a shareholders agreement with your co-founders to govern how you will fund the Company. 

There are many articles online governing how founders equity should be split.  Rather than just dividing up such shares equally between the founders (this assumes that all intend to contribute in equal portions to the venture), the Harvard Business Review suggests that a better way is to have vesting arrangements in place between the founders.  This means that if a founder leaves or stops contributing to the Company, the remaining founders can acquire part or all of that founder’s shares in the Company.

• Government Grants

Singapore has many government grants which assume that your company has Singaporean shareholders holding more than 30% of the shareholdings of the Company.  For more information on Singapore government grants, do visit Enterprise Singapore’s website with more details on this.

For a quick summary of other Singapore government grants, do visit Aspire’s blog post on this.

• Growth Strategy

“Build it and they will come”.  This mantra is not true in any way for any business startup in Singapore whether offline or online.  When planning for your new venture, do spend time listing out how you will generate leads for sales for your new venture. 

This could be in the way of: (i) appointing distributors for your products; (ii) digital marketing for your product; (iii) offline marketing by flyers in your neighborhood; (iv) posting classified ads (Both online or offline).

• Leverage Technology

There are many new technologies like Zoom/Whatsapp (which you can add to your website so your clients can message you to ask about your products and services)/Wechat (online Chinese channel for distribution).

Spend time learning about each social media medium and find one that can bring benefits to your target client/customer base.

If your product is B2C then Facebook and Google ads may be useful for you.  If your product is B2B, Google Ads and Linkedin is a good platform for you to buy ads on.

• Suppliers  

Always spend time choosing a good supplier where you have good chemistry with and not just the cheapest.  The reason for this is in bad times, a supplier that is your friend will extend you credit while the cheapest supplier may not be interested in helping you in bad times.

For goods distribution business ventures, you may want to source globally now like on Taobao/Alibaba to reduce your cost of acquisition.

• Customers

In this busy digital age, one should try to keep in touch with clients and customers.  One simple way is to have a digital newsletter for your customers and you aim to email them once a month to maintain and touch base with them.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our Business Startup Singapore – 8 key tips for your new venture when starting up your business in Singapore.  Do leave comments for us below if you have any comments on our articles.

About Raffles CPA

Raffles CPA is a leading global professional services firm headquartered in Singapore that serves global clients. 

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