Carol Andrews writes for Plexpack which offers continuous band sealer, shrink packaging machinery and many other items for your e-commerce and other packaging needs.
When starting a new business, it’s important to have all your ducks in row. You’ve likely got a solid business plan penned, a lender on the hook, and a lot of ideas about how you want to proceed with getting your fledgling enterprise off the ground. There are going to be a lot of attendant costs with any start-up operation, and since you are likely to have a finite amount of funding, you’re going to be watching every penny. Of course, this necessitates cutting back in some areas that you would like to spend more, and often the first things to go are packaging and quality control. However, you should think twice before short-changing these areas. They could be more important to your success than you think.
The difficulty with slashing quality control should be obvious. If you don’t check for problems before shipping out products, you could end up sending defective items. However, with all your manpower devoted to processing orders, manufacturing goods, and getting them shipped in a timely manner, you don’t seem to have the additional time or money needed to focus on quality control. Besides, if workers are doing their jobs correctly, you should need QC in the first place, right? Wrong. The problem here is that you’re looking at the issue from the wrong angle.
Most start-ups have a few employees who wear a lot of hats. Their attention is constantly divided between a number of tasks, some of which they’re bound to excel at and others that they will be new to or ill-suited for. You are not a large corporation that can delegate a single task for each employee (better ensuring that it receives their full attention and they have the expertise to do it flawlessly). For this reason, it is imperative that you double-check every item that leaves your workroom before it is sent to a client. Otherwise you could end up losing the very people who are keeping your business afloat.
As for packaging, there are a couple of reasons to make it a priority. First and foremost, insufficient packing materials can result in damage. You don’t want this for obvious reasons. Spend the money to ensure that any items you ship are thoroughly protected. Secondly, the actual packaging of your product reflects on your brand. If you want clients to take you seriously as a business, you need to impress them at first glance. This means when they receive their orders, they see an outer shell that inspires confidence in the professionalism and know-how of your company. At the very least, you should have a package that sports your company logo, although it couldn’t hurt to feature a design that visually reinforces your brand image and speaks to your demographic.
Starting a new business is not easy. There are a lot of details to attend to and tough decisions to make. But don’t think that you can cut out important areas like packaging and quality control simply because you don’t see the end result of such negligence. Your clients will let you know, in no uncertain terms, that cutting costs in these areas is not acceptable – likely when they opt for the competition.
