The Spiralling Costs Of Forming A Company

Companies Made Simple is joining Laura Andrews from the formation of her company to its launch. In this post, Laura reflects on her business plan and comments on the spiralling costs of forming a company!

Well, I am on week three in my formation diary and it is safe to say it has been an extremely busy time! It would be great if I could concentrate all of my energy into getting the company off the ground but, unfortunately I still have to carry on with my day job!

 
This week has taught me a few important lessons – namely, the importance of planning a realistic budget. As you know, we are doing all of the pre-launch promotional activity ourselves and while we have had some great ideas, in reality, they have turned out to be a lot more expensive than I had originally accounted for.
I think this is down to the fact that, in my original planning, I made educated guesses at how much things would cost and allocated the budget accordingly. However, now that I have contacted suppliers and they have come back with quotes, I realise I had dramatically underestimated how much the pre-launch activity I had planned was going to cost.
Looking at my initial projections now, I realise that I just didn’t go into enough detail where the figures were concerned and though the activities we had planned can’t be defined as ‘business critical’ , I do think that they would help progress the business and am therefore reluctant to compromise.
So this week I have mainly been going through each expense and investigating ways of reducing costs. I have been surprised at the number of suppliers who have been willing to re-negotiate but on the whole I have had to think a bit more creatively, to keep the launch on schedule.
Speak soon,

Laura