Company Formation The Importance of Suppliers

As we have commented on a number of occasions on this blog, what your company looks like at the point of launch, will probably be very different from what you originally thought at the point of company formation. In this post, we catch up with Laura Andrews – CEO of recent company formation Beautifully Organic – as she learns that the site she has tirelessly worked on for four months, may not be as great as she originally thought.
“Uh-oh – the site need to be completely redesigned.”
This is not the best news to receive a couple of weeks away from launch, when you have invested a lot of time and considerable resource into a predominately online business. So as you can imagine, I was not best pleased when our new web designer – and recent partner in the company – delivered this bombshell.
When I first formed the company, I had a working knowledge of online marketing, but not the technical aspects of getting a site online and making sure it performed and functioned well as an e-commerce platform.  Therefore, I completely trusted the designers I was working with. Now that the relationship has dissolved and I have taken on a new media company – the CEO of which is the non-executive director of my business – a number of technical flaws have been identified and they have suggested that rather than fix the original system, it would be better to completely redesign it.
However, it is not commercially viable to delay the launch of the site further ,due to all the promotional activity we have planned in the run up to the launch. Also, while the site maybe have a number of flaws on a management and technical level, from a user’s perspective – as the focus groups I have held confirmed – the content and user ability of the original site is great.
Therefore, I have made the important decision to continue with the scheduled launch date. The work on the re-design will begin now, but we will  launch that version in the New Year. Not only will this strategy ensure that all the promotional activity I had planned is not a complete waste of money and time, it will also provide us with the opportunity to ask our customers what they think could add value to the ‘user experience’ on the site.
This is a set back and I would advise all entrepreneurs considering company formation to take the time to thoroughly investigate the suppliers you intend to work with, before committing to anything. Or –like me – you will pay for it later.

Laura.