There are various startup schemes and government grants provided by the government in Serangoon Singapore that you can benefit from. There are a number of business support grants for companies to help them overcome obstacles in their growth. Overall aim of these grants is to help businesses in capability upgrading and internationalization.
Government knows the important role that its startups and SMEs play in its economy and hence support these entities with business support grants. Financing is one of the most fundamental aspects of starting and growing your business. There are hundreds of government grants available for small businesses that help in saving money, lowering startup costs and helping grow your business.
Business support grants are small amount of seed money that further the goals of federal, state, or non-profit organizations. Unlike a loan, you don’t have to repay it. Most business support grants in Serangoon are awarded to help launch a start-up or new business, with the aim to generate jobs and stimulate the economy. There are fewer grants available for established businesses.
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Government can assist businesses in two ways- financial help and administrative support. Understand what government grants are available to businesses. Grants are available to sole traders, partnership, limited companies and social enterprises.
Now grants aren’t just government funded as more and more organizations develop grants program in Serangoon. Grants are now offered by government, private agencies, universities, corporations and humanitarians.
Business grants are available in all kinds of forms. Generally, business support grants are either a direct grant, equity finance or a soft loan. Direct grant is money given to your new business to cover startup essentials such as investment in equipment, training or reaching new markets. Equity finance, not strictly a grant, offers reduction in income tax on investment made in new businesses. Soft loans are actually loans with lower interest rates and more generous terms than other lending.
Suzie was a new hire business-to-business sales representative. She had just completed the company's two-week basic training course. After the training, her sales manager met with her.
"Suzie, congratulations on completing the training," he said. "Remember, you have three months to make your quota. We have provided base salary, cell phone, laptop, desk and car allowance. Now go sell something!
What does Suzie do next? She probably will run around like crazy, trying to find anyone who might have the slightest interest in buying her product, while the quota clock relentlessly ticks. What did the company that employed Suzie miss? It failed to understand the fundamental difference between marketing and sales. This misunderstanding may cause Suzie to waste a lot of time, the company to incur unnecessary expense, and adversely impact operations. Here is what every business should know:
• Marketing is about finding prospective buyers with a need, want or desire to which you can sell. Marketing is finding.
• Sales is about helping an identified prospective buyer fill a need, want or desire from which they benefit. Sales is filling.
If this distinction didn't hit, go back and read it again. It's that important.
By having Suzie find her own prospects (someone that may have interest in buying), the company has placed the marketing responsibility on her shoulders. You may think, well that's what salespeople are supposed to do.
That's the common misconception. About 50 percent to 70 percent of a salesperson's time is spent trying to find a prospect. That's mostly wasted time. If Suzie's "finding time" could be re-allocated to "filling time" - being in front of more prospects, selling, she probably would close more business.
Without any certainty that Suzie will make a sale, the company will invest at least $3,000 in hiring, time, salary, equipment and car allowance before Suzie begins seeking sales prospects. If she's fired after three months, the company will have to go through the entire process again, resulting in additional expenses.
Here is a quick example on how expenses can add up. By placing the "finding" burden on the sales rep, a company will wind up replacing 30 percent of its sales force every three months.
Suppose there are 10 sales people on staff. That means spending $36,000 to hire new sales people in a 12-month period. Perhaps that company may be better off taking that $36,000 and investing it into marketing to find new customers.
Without business owners or executives realizing it, the sales / marketing misconception can cause flaws in a business plan as well as operational issues.
Here's an example. In the 1990's, telecommunications was exploding. Many new companies hired armies of sales reps, who had to find perspective customers and sell them.
They were given three months to make quota or be fired. Each day, they had to bring back 50 business cards - walking into businesses where they didn't know anyone - to prove they had satisfied their cold-calling requirement.
Sure enough, every three months, 30 percent of the sales force was fired.
What happened to these companies? Some went bankrupt while others eventually were rescued in buyouts. These were all well-funded companies. But the top executives failed to understand the distinction between marketing and sales.
What was the Marketing Department doing if the sales reps were doing marketing? Well, it thought it was doing marketing. In one case, it spent a lot of money hiring a well-known sports figure and holding fancy parties for big customers to attend, where they could hobnob and get an autograph.
Also, the Marketing Department was busy analyzing the kinds of customers that sales was selling.
Marketing is a vast area. But at it core, it needs to find people to turn into customers. Otherwise, marketing has probably drifted off into analysis dreamland.
Here's an example in which marketing hit a home run for a startup company.
To kick off sales efforts, the marketing manager found a shopping mall that was hosting a local business day. Space was purchased at the mall show for $500. A mailer was sent just before the show, inviting residents and business owners to stop by the table to enter a drawing for a free gift. The mailer cost $400. Sales reps greeted people who stopped by the table. The result was 30 new customers. The event was a big success.
Go through all the business cards that sales representatives have given you and look at their titles. If it says "sales representative," call the rep and ask them if they have to find their own prospects.
But if it says "marketing representative," you can bet the company is confused about the distinction between sales and marketing. Make sure that the mixed-up company isn't yours, whether you're a one-person operation, small business or large organization.
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Many programs can assist small business to access professional advice and support in critical early stages of establishing a business. While there are a lot of grants available, getting a business support grant from the government can be a challenge. Government grants are often complex with lots of processes and stages, and each grant will have its own requirements and criteria for applying.
While being awarded a grant is winning, they are notoriously hard to acquire. Not only are grants programs highly competitive, they can take months to process. Aside from finding one you’d be eligible for, you have to compete with other companies for the same. The other downside is that grants usually come with specific instructions on how you can use the money.
A grant for companies in Serangoon Singapore can give your business a huge leg up and can be a great alternative to traditional finance. To apply for grants, first become familiar with the process. Eligibility for grants will vary depending on the grant in question.
Do your research. Identify programs that are a match for your business. Apply for the grant and submit eligibility requirements. Keep in mind that you’ll need to meet certain criteria to be eligible.
In two independent studies,actually, I did two. I am in the class of the Sloan Fellows '18. I just graduated two weeks ago. So when I came here to Sloan, I was interested, and I was super focused on working in intersection of government,technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. When I started doing my research, I realized that there was a super interesting space, that it's about the startups doing work in selling to governments to improve the service delivery.
So my research, my independent study, has been focused on this space. So to narrow the topic of my independent study, the key was the work that I did with Anjali. Actually, she helped me a lot. And when you come hereto the university, you have a lot of interests.
And everything is super broad. You want to do everything,and you can't in this kind of independent study. So having these kind of conversations every week, several hours per week, helped me a lot. So what I wanted to do with my independent study was a combination of research to see which was the academic or these research papers already made in the market, in this market, or in this specific space,but also see and take advantage of the connections that you have here at MIT to see what was going on in the market.
So with Anjali, we decided to create what we call Public Techat MIT Series of speakers, that it was a good excuse for us to go out there, say, OK, I'm doing this research. I'm doing these lines of research about these, these,and these things. But I want to know what you are doing in this space. So please, can you come here to MIT and explain us what you are doing? And I mean, that was amazing. I don't think that no one is coming nowhere if you as a student go. But if you go and you say, I'm studying what you are doing here at MIT. They come. So with this excuse,we had several people, super level people doing super interesting stuff, that came here to explain us what they were doing.
And afterwards, we had the opportunity, of course, to take all that experience and all that information to put it, in my case,in my research paper. And that was amazing. Here in Sloan, you come, and suddenly, you have an entire ecosystem for you. The challenge here is to understand the ecosystem and to know where is your tribe of people that are interested in the same things that you are interested in and to be super efficient with your time.
Because at the end of the day,you have so many things to do. So that combination of good classes-- I mean like the state of the art of many things in these classes-- and this ecosystem on opportunities to do and action learning and to have this kind of interaction and debates and conversations with people that are already doing these kind of things, it's amazing. I don't think that you will have these in many other universities.
Well, I learned many things during this process, especially because I was interested in something super, super specific and not necessarily very common in this school. So I was coming from the public sector. This is a business school. But it still is a business and administration school, right? So in Australia, you have also in the government.
So what I had the chance with this independent study was like to focus on a specifically this space that maybe I didn't have too many chances or too many opportunities to work on in other classes or in another events or whatever that they had in the school.
So the structure, the work, in independent study is kind of complicated. I think that it's the most challenging thing. Why? Because at the end of the day, you have a lot of classes with a lot of a homework and assignments due tomorrow or yesterday. So when you have these independent studies that you know that you have the whole term to do it, you are always having other kind of priorities.
So for me, it was key to create an outline from the beginning and create a schedule for that outline. So at least I knew, and I was tracking my performance and my development. And that helped a lot. It's true that at the end of the day you take this last week that you have at the end of the term to focus or to create,to edit, or to make it the substantial thing of the independent study, but I think that I did a very good job of doing these all these research and everything before.
I would say in the first part of the term. Talking about the challenges that I had when working my independent study, I would say that maybe in my second independent study that it was about,as I said before, taking a case, areal case, and use the research and the academic content that I was studying, apply it, and see what could happen.
And so I started with,let's say, with an idea, thinking that that was the right thing to do and that it could work in that specific context. For a specific example there,I was studying in Peru. And when I went through all the research, I was realizing that it was not going to work. And that's super complicated because it's a real case.
It's real people working with a lot of engagement and a lot of ideas or are super positive about doing something like that. And I was seen studying different cases, studying the research done,studying all the information that I could get from the MIT, that thing that they were doing. And I was studying. It was not going to work. So for me, it was kind of struggling in the process because I didn't want to tell them that, but I could not do it. So I remember that I went through all the process of writing everything. And at the end of the day, at the end of the process, I said, I need to put down my recommendations and hard recommendations. Like saying, OK, so there are some baselines that you are taking from random that are not OK-- blah, blah, blah, this kind of things that it was kind of; And I had a conversation with them.
It was hard. But you can see there the real value of the independent study and the process that you are doing, right? At least I guess that; I don't think that they are doing any more this project because the conversation that we had because the research that I did. And that has value. But it was hard.
Each scheme is different. Check you meet the general terms and conditions. Talk to the grant body to assess chances of success. Read grant objectives carefully. Have a great business plan.