Entrepreneurship is a rewarding venture, but when it comes to launching a startup, there’s no evading the struggles and challenges that come with it. As a determined business person, you have to confront the obstacles to realize growth.
As a new business owner or entrepreneur, you should have a solid plan that will help you overcome the hurdles that lie ahead.
If you believe you’re up to the task of establishing a business and making it a success, then take note of the challenges below. These challenges are meant to motivate you to work smarter and outperform the rest.
Having Adequate Finances for Your Business
Let’s face it: when you are just starting your business, you need money to lift it off the ground. Money will always be an issue, especially if you want to avoid debts or loans.
Not having financing can delay everything from rolling out your products, fitting new office premises, or hiring essential staff. You have a lot to accomplish before you can sit down and enjoy your progress.
Your success will only flow from the initial investment – that is, if you’ve managed to fund your office space, product or software development, marketing efforts, and much more.
To avoid running out of cash in the early stages of starting your startup, you need to plan well ahead. One way to do that is to sell your vision and idea to potential investors. You and your teams can brainstorm and develop a good presentation, a healthy business plan, and put your persuasion skills to practice.
You must understand effective ways to pitch venture capitalists and investors until they agree to put their money in your business, however hard that is.
Determining a Unique Selling Point to Stand Out in the Competitive Market
Regardless of how excellent your services or products are, the market out there is crowded and will keep growing. If you’re struggling to determine a unique selling point to outshine your competition, you should get up and find that particular aspect of differentiation.
As a new business owner, it can be quite challenging to determine your unique selling point. You get lost in the crowd because you don’t have one, and you cannot pull in enough clients to support your business. But you can achieve this by following these few steps:
1. Identify unique features and benefits your products or services have and research to compare them with your direct competitors. This will help you determine what sets you apart.
2. Find out the emotional need your product or service is meeting. To point it out well, you should think about it from a customer’s perspective.
3. Pinpoint specific aspects of your products or services that your direct competitors cannot mimic. Ensure you highlight everything that they can’t copy, reproduce, or duplicate.
4. Create precise, short, and concise phrases about your unique services or products using words from the features, needs, and exceptional products/services you identified in steps 1-3 above. Make sure the phrases can be communicated quickly and will be understood by your target customers.
5. The phrase should answer the customer’s essential question: “What will I gain from it?” So you have to make your phrase precise and to the point while stating how it will benefit your customer. Make the customer choose you over your competition.
Use the phrase in your marketing campaign and make sure to highlight your unique selling point across all customer touchpoints.
Choosing the Right Business Model
As you work to start your new business, you should keep in mind the saturated market out there. Unless you select the right business model, you’ll probably end up frustrated and on the verge of giving up.
Work smart to choose the right business model that will be there for the long term. A scalable business model will have the potential to bring in more revenue with very minimal expenditure.
This is what investors look for – a scalable or ready-to-scale business that can increase profits without incurring high costs.
You should choose and build a business model that will fully support your goals for growth. Once you have it in place, you must try to automate processes as much as possible or outsource all the business’s non-strategic aspects to cut expenses. This will also attract investors.
Remember to generate your own business ideas or concepts to fit with your market research and reach more customers.
To find out if your business model is viable, you should look at your pricing strategy, the cost of marketing and selling your products or services, operational costs, employee costs, and the initial costs for setting up the business. You should ensure that these figures can fit into your financial plan.
Finding the Right Employees and Partners
Getting the right team for your business is essential, but it can be quite challenging when you’re just starting out. At the initial stages of your business, you need a strategic team to brainstorm on the best ways to grow the business.
However, you may also need to outsource certain functions to service providers who specialize in those areas. For example, when it comes to your IT requirements, it can be beneficial to seek out managed IT services near you staffed by professionals well-versed in supporting the technology needs of startups.
With a core internal team focused on strategic growth initiatives combined with outsourced experts handling specialized requirements, you’ll be better positioned to scale your operations efficiently from the ground up.
Additionally, a good team should make your possibilities a reality because they believe in them just as you do. They’ll share your vision and passion and work alongside you to build a successful business.
A team of specialists will impact your business positively since you share the same ideals. You can bring them in as employees or partners.
To bring on board the right teams, you should devise a good hiring strategy from the beginning and outline the roles you are looking for and how each one of them aligns with your business goals.
Finding Your Ideal Audience
Even in your business’s early stages, you should start marketing your idea to connect with potential clients, collect feedback, and pre-sell your service or product.
You can offer valuable information to people about your brand through blog posts. Research from Price Intelligently confirms that businesses with blogs can attract 67% more leads and close them ten times more.
You can also promote your brand and product on social media networks to target more audiences. But first, you have to identify your audience and their needs to reach them more quickly and grow your business much faster. Invest in inbound and outbound marketing after studying your competition and their customers.
Remember, potential customers, are often skeptical and hesitant about any new business. They prefer to cling to those they’re used to or those that have a broad audience following. To overcome this, you should create a buyer persona and market to them. Identify people who are most likely to use your product or enjoy your services and market to them.
When determining the type of audience you want to serve, you need to consider the differences between B2C and B2B sales strategies. In B2C, you can make a large number of small purchases fast, while B2B usually involves more decision-makers and tends to have longer sales cycles.
Ensure that you also enhance your online presence by optimizing your website for SEO to place your business before your ideal audience effectively.
Determining your business strategy
The success of your business relies on how effective your business strategy is. A business strategy details how you will compete in your market, and how you’ll ensure that you make a profit. Your business strategy can help to make key company decisions and make good use of your resources.
At this stage, it can be helpful to work with a strategic planning consultant. Strategic planning is used to design a roadmap, helping your business to achieve its goals. Planning your future is the key to growing your company.
Final Thoughts
Establish a new business and making it a successful venture is not easy. But if you work smart, your efforts will pay much more than you anticipated.
Creating an excellent plan with the right teams will help you sail through the difficult times and make your business thrive.
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Ashley Wilson is a content creator, writing about business and tech. She has been known to reference movies in casual conversation and enjoys baking homemade treats for her husband and their two felines, Lady and Gaga. You can get in touch with Ashley via Twitter.