What financial and management advise will you give to someone planning to start a small scale business ?
The most important thing to do is to write everything down. Make a solid business plan. Include information about marketing,finance and how your company operates. Think of every possible scenario that could affect your business. Positive and negative. Think about political,economic and technological changes and how this applies to your company.
Your financial plan needs to be on point. Investors don't necessarily look at your idea. They look at the numbers! It is most likely you will not know everything so go look for a good accountant. They are key when building a financial plan.
The best advice I can give you is to surround yourself with people who know a lot more about things than you. Let's take a loot at my personal situation. My dream is to start a business. So I need to make a good business plan. During every step making this plan, I will ask advice to a lot of skilled people. One of my friends is a marketing expert. Perfect! I already asked one of my evening school teachers to look into my business idea. Perfect! My idea consists of a smartphone app so who do I think of? My brother. He's a specialist in programming and IT. Perfect!
Don't be afraid to ask advice to people. You will need feedback on basically everything you will do. It is essential if you want to improve your product but also they way how you deal with your employees. Accepting and handling feedback will eventually lead much more likely to success.