Usually, when a person is planning on starting their own business, they are haunted and daunted by stories of businesses failing just two weeks into entrepreneurship. This culminates in self-doubt and a complete lack of confidence in his ability to sustain a business. Although, it is true that every entrepreneur feels the weight of the business entity on his shoulders, what he may not realize is that one of the aspects of running a business is embracing the risk and learning to live with it. Entrepreneurship, no doubt, comes with recurring challenges. Whether experienced or not, entrepreneurs have to deal with this. But what are these challenges anyway? In this article we’ll explore some of the most common struggles faced by businessmen:
1. Realizing The Depth Of Water You Are Swimming In
No matter how long they’ve been in business, they’ll always face the need to meet or exceed the competition posed by competitors. Ensuring the competition is well-met needs to factor in profit maintenance as well. When the profit margin is negatively affected, the entire business is likely to suffer extensive blows which can harm your financing. Lack of finance is the main obstacle that needs to be overcome in order for a potential business starter to even go down this path. Financing is a tough ball game because a new entrepreneur is likely to be denied loans from banks on the basis of being inexperienced. Experienced entrepreneurs don’t have it easy either because monetary support is a constant requirement throughout business ventures, they have to constantly retain a good sum of funds to have it available to them whenever needed. But being in business for some time, they still have some advantages over newcomers. For newcomers to get investors to invest in their businesses is a difficult task. A person may have to prove himself in ways that are convincing and appear promising to prospective creditors or investors. Not to mention, he’d also be exhausting his thinking capacity in coming up with funding options for his set up.
2. Overcoming Your Personal Life To Stay Focused On Your Employees
Starters who’ve never run businesses before will find this especially hard. Recruiting the right crew is stressful, time consuming and exhausting. Judging from just resumes and a few interviews, the owner is supposed to conclude the candidate’s potential and trustworthiness. Not having recruitment experience or foresight into determining which employees are suitable and genuine, can result in incurring one of the very first blowbacks.
Even before you have to deal with a staff you need to take care of employee number one, yourself. Figuring out how to stay focused despite family life, social activities, or the easy feeling of giving up is extremely important. Some entrepreneurs who have had issues with work-related stress have spiraled out of control and towards failure. A company like Low Cost Interlock is making products to help stay on the straight and narrow when stress is at an all-time high. Finding help in the form of a device, an activity like exercise, or turning to therapy to speak out your troubles is setting you and your business up for long-term success and not a short-term failure.
3. Never Stop Looking Towards The Future
The founder is expected to brainstorm and come up with business ideas in the face of competition during the initial part of the process of getting started. This is called having a vision. Are you able to find ways to grow your business long-term no matter the industry? Will customers/clients/consumers be convinced to spend on his products or services? Will I be able to attain a steady check? Make sales and maintain the sales rate? The answer to these questions depend on circumstances, the execution process, back up plans, alternatives, and strategies to sustain a business enough to keep it afloat even during low-profit turnouts. Dealing with this uncertainty is one of the hardest challenges. These unknown factors can very well threaten the business stability. However, the experience can teach a person to latch on to new developments and draw advantages from them, based on what the trends and technological innovations may have to offer.
Albeit, they are tons of problems that are common occurrences but the attitude an individual should adopt towards them is that of being strong headed and determined. The building, sustaining and expanding a business is a lifelong battle between indecisiveness and perseverance. Holding up strong and being decisive through prolonged periods of risk and stress can ensure the company’s survival. A person should take on new challenges and be on the lookout for any opportunities to revamp or revive his failing business. The first few years can be most volatile but if he can work past these obstacles and prepare his counter strategies in time, there are higher chances of him making the cut for the successful world of entrepreneurs.
