Essential Legal Steps When Growing Your Small Business

Law for Small Business For Dummies - UK

It's important that you remember to take important legal steps when you're growing your small business. When your business is really flying, you're rushing round excitedly like a howling dervish doing the following simultaneously:

Securing your next round of funding for sales and marketing.
Consolidating your supply chain.
Developing user growth and/or revenue.
Obtaining market validation.
Developing sales and distribution channels.
Expanding into new markets and territories.

In your quieter moments, here are the legal priorities you have to contemplate as your business takes off:

Agreeing terms for "series A" funding and signing agreement(s).
Negotiating and agreeing trading agreements for manufacture, distribution and licensing, wholesaling, and retailing.
Negotiating and agreeing service agreements for sales agents, sales affiliates and using software as a service (SaaS).
Contracting with consumers.
Applying consumer law properly (for example, the Consumer Rights Act, 2015).
Putting a proper process in place for dealing with consumer complaints.
Contracting abroad — exporting, franchising, licensing and setting up subsidiaries.

About This Article

About the book author:

Clive Rich is a lawyer, mediator, arbitrator and negotiator. He is Chairman of LawBite, an online legal service providing 'Simple Law for Small Companies' (www.lawbite.co.uk).