Building a successful business is one of the toughest challenges any entrepreneur will ever face. The drive and passion exhibited by most at the inception of their businesses is usually so toxic that anyone who comes in contact with them would believe they had already built a successful business.
While being passionate about pursuing your dreams and starting a new business is critical to your success, it is important to overcome some challenges if you’re truly going to build a successful business.
These challenges can make or mar your efforts, but entrepreneurs who overcome every single one of them turn out successful on the long run.
If you’re hell-bent on starting and growing a successful business, here are 7 business challenges you must overcome:
1). Making Your First Profitable Sale:
Marketing is the life-blood of every business. Without it, you will make no sales, without sales, you’ll have no cashflow, and without cashflow, you’ll be unable to meet your financial obligations.
Making your first profitable sale is one of the most daunting business challenges. This is even more critical because, a business can only truly grow when it hits its break-even point. When an entrepreneur finds making a profitable sale a big problem, speculating the break-even point becomes a dream.
This reason is why it is important that before a business is registered or incurs any form of indirect expense, the founders should first attempt to sell their product(s) to see people’s reactions.
When you make successful sales at a low acquisition cost before you even lease an office space or print a single complimentary card, you can know it’s safe to follow-up the business venture and attempt to secure more investment.
See Also: The Most Important Thing To Do Before You Start Any Business
2). Securing Capital To Start Or Grow Your Business:
After proving your business idea, another business challenge to overcome is securing capital to either start or expand your business.
Money is like fuel in a business. It keeps it running smoothly through all its trials and triumphs. Without it, it is very difficult for even the most brilliant of ideas to scale through.
Securing startup capital for your business is a must if you will grow beyond the point your business hovers around. The only problem with this is that investors part with their money sparingly. They’re never too eager to throw in their funds into any business, and would mostly only invest in a company that they learnt of through a mutual friend.
If you hope to raise a substantial sum to run your business, start first by building a strong network. You can do this by attending networking events, seeking advice from experienced and successful entrepreneurs via email, and a lot more.
By building your network, you increase the chances of people recommending your business to an investor or two they know.
See Also: 10 Things To Do If Your Startup Capital Is Not Enough
3). Finding & Hiring The Right Team Members:
The strength and skill of your team is everything! While you may be able to go fast alone, going far will require creative teamwork from the most intelligent people you can find.
Building a successful business isn’t just about having a great product or raising a substantial investment, it also involves having the right team of people who would spend a lot of time building the various parts of the business to near-perfection in their own ways. It might be worthwhile looking at team building exercises such as the fun team activities with the Fantastic Race. This sort of activity will help your team members feel more comfortable with one another and it will make your team stronger for your business.
Your brand manager for instance would spend a lot of time crafting your business’s image, the head of marketing and sales would spend time growing the company’s revenues through an enhanced sales process, and many other individuals on your team would spend their time making the most out of their various departments.
It’s not even your team members that you need to rely on. If you are a business that has to do a lot of contracts with other people for example, you could always look at using something like this business bond company. As a business owner, you want to make sure you follow through on a deal. Bonding proves that you’re a credible company that stands by its word. This is something that is very important for when people consider using you as a business (this is for both clients and potential team members).
Finding and hiring the right team members will not only reduce the workload, but would also ensure you have the best minds working with you to overcome your business challenges to build a successful business.
4). Not Working With A Great Business Plan:
Another business challenge you must overcome is not working with a plan. Most businesses fail because they lack direction and focus. They run their daily activities as it comes and end their statements with “God knows best”.
If you’re serious about starting and growing a successful business, you need a road map to follow. This will ensure you’re on the right direction every single step of the way.
A football game or battle that’s gone into without a plan ends up badly. You must be prepared for anything that comes your way, and must have a game plan. Without one, you’ll only end up as another failure that couldn’t figure out where they went wrong. In terms of IT, check out this article – 7 Common Network Security Mistakes Made By Small Businesses to make sure you have an IT plan.
See Also: The Dos And Don’ts Of Writing An Amazing Business Plan
5). Managing Money Right:
Of all the business challenges an entrepreneur will face, the most dangerous and largely overlooked is poor money management. This single problem has ended more businesses than have ever succeeded.
Expenses suck the life out of your business; especially uncontrolled expenses. Its only mission is to make money leave your organisation.
When you’re spending weigh more than your business is earning, there’d be a heavy negative cashflow index running through your organisation, and it’s a matter of time before operations come to a halt.
This is one of the most dangerous business challenges every startup must overcome. No matter how amazing your product is, how great your sales are, or how brilliant your team members may seem, if you cannot control your expenses, your business would eventually hit a wall.
See Also: 7 Sure Ways To Cut Your Small Business Expenses And Increase Your Profit
6). Improving Your Skills:
Your skills could either be moving your business forward or holding you back. This single reason is the importance for every entrepreneur to establish a culture of constant skill acquisitions and upgrades.
Launching and growing a business are two entirely different things, and require diverse skill sets. While launching a business is a lot easier, growing one requires you gaining exceptional sales skills, management skills, and the ability to innovate in real time to solve pressing customer problems. These are important skills that can be gotten both by experience and by attending advanced training programs.
Overcoming the challenge of constantly improving your skill set will determine how much larger your business grows or not.
7). Not Accepting Change:
Many entrepreneurs abhor the thought of welcoming any form of change. They’re repulsive towards it and would reject it even at the face of imminent failure.
Sometimes your idea may not be as good as you thought, your business processes may be overtly outdated, even the way your products are presented may no longer be accepted. At this point, the important thing to do is to take a step back and analyse every part of your business, identify the outdated strategies and processes used, look over your strengths and weaknesses, study your opportunities and threats, and then put in measures to ensure your business is smartly immersed in the latest market trends.
By welcoming change, you overcome one of the toughest business challenges many entrepreneurs have problems with, and so, position your business for growth.
What are your thoughts on these 7 business challenges every entrepreneur must overcome to be successful? Let me know by leaving a comment below.
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This is a great write-up especially in the paragraph that talked about change, that is what brings most business down. You must be ready to embrace change. Thanks for the write-up.
Thank you for the commendation Isiaq.
There is always a huge exuberance for beginning a new business venture. But what do you think, is it easy or the most complicated one? Honestly, I don’t know what others think, but I think it is a tough task to start a sphere, and it is even more maddening for every business owner to survive in the long run. In fact, sometimes it becomes intolerable when someone is operating his business without appropriate planning. Here, you have listed some major metier challenges. Thus, if an entrepreneur wants to overcome these above summonses satisfactorily, then first he should treatise himself and his team. Then he should go for searching the right ways to overcome these stumbling backs and if he fails to do so, then he should hire a mentor, because he is the one who will give him the right solution to every problem. Here, I can conclude that staying positive is the best way to make every hardship pleasurable.
Thank you for the contribution, Brian.