I opened my female beauty store Lyoness this time last year and throughout that year we have learned a huge amount about how to run a business. My partner and I both did years of research and homework before we launched this business but just like with driving a car, you don’t really learn anything until you get behind the wheel. All told Lyoness has done well in the first year, we aren’t in profit of course, but we have done very well in getting set up, building a customer base and learning about how we can best operate. Here is what we have learned from our first year in business.

Recruiting

Before opening Lyoness we believed that we had a solid team in place yet it transpired after just a couple of months that while we had selected some good staff, we hadn’t considered the team as a whole. The result of this was quite a few characters who simply couldn’t work together and we had to work hard on conflict resolution, additional training and in the case of 2 members of staff, we had to rehire. We have learned then that when recruiting for Lyoness, we must take into consideration how that person may fit in with the team.

Outsource

After the first 3 months of hard work to get things off the ground we figured that things may calm down slightly but this just wasn’t the case. Both my partner and myself were working around the clock and a couple of months ago we realized that things had to change. Because of how hard we were working we weren’t really able to give 100% to anything. We decided then that we had taken on too much and that we had to start getting some help in order to both help the business and our sanity. Since then we have employed both software and other companies to deal with things like payroll, accounting and ordering, and the business is far better because of it.

Marketing

Somewhat naively we only invested heavily in marketing from the outset as we believed that this would be all that was required, creating hype around the business and getting customers through the door. Unfortunately we have learned that whilst this does work in the for instance, you must continue to market your company to people because the marketing cycle is highly competitive and if you aren’t in it, nobody will know that you exist. We spent so much money on that initial marketing campaign that we had very little left to do any more, and so in the next fiscal year we will do things very differently and spread our marketing budget out across the whole year.

All told we have had a great year here at Lyoness and although there are a few bits and pieces which we would like to change, we have learned a lot and we can’t wait for the challenge of the coming year.