After months of planning and sleepless nights tossing and turning, you’ve finally taken the leap and started your own business. As someone who has been reporting to someone higher-up all his life working as an employee in some company, you know the ride has not been easy and it is only going to get tougher. But you are determined to make it through and your mind is filled with excitement, anxiety and everything in between. But you know this was your calling and you had to make an exit from the usual 9-to-5 before you head explodes.
So things look good and the birds are chirping. You feel good about starting your own business and you pat yourself on your back for taking such a bold step. You begin to feel confident that things will all fall into place and it’ll be a launch of a very successful venture. But are things as easy as we make them out to be? Are things going to go as plan?
It has been estimated that the majority of the startups close down within the first two years. That’s a scary thought to entertain. As much as business owners want to hold on to their dear entrepreneurial ventures, things don’t go as planned sometimes. Let’s look at some of the most common reasons why businesses fail and how to mitigate the chances of that happening to yours:
1) No business plan: This one is rather straightforward. People who have successful businesses have one thing in common and that is having a plan in place. Without studying the market and the different dynamics involved therein, you’d be hard-pressed to find some loopholes to fill, something new to offer. Launching a business is easy but sustaining it for long is extremely difficult. Without having a proper business plan, you will soon find yourself in murky waters with no way to know where to go next.
2) Hiring incorrectly: Your business may be your baby but you will definitely need a few extra hands to take care of it. A lot of business owners want to hire other people in order to train them and free their own time to focus on building the business further. However, hiring people is tricky. If you end up recruiting people who are not experienced and do not have the required skillset to keep up the demanding atmosphere of a startup, you’d be struggling to keep things together.
3) No online presence: It’s almost 2020 and if you don’t have an online presence, you don’t deserve to be an entrepreneur. People are not just shopping in malls and stores around the street corner, they are all over the internet looking for products they need and services they want to utilize. As a website development company in Mumbai, we get a lot of clients who want to get their businesses on the internet and they have been happier and successful. Once you get online, you can then do a ton of things such as leveraging the power of digital marketing or SEO or paid advertising. The options to direct visitors to your web property suddenly doesn’t feel constrained.
4) Not using resources: We understand that as a newly launched business, you would want to save expenditures. There’s the rent, the utility bills, taxes and whatnot to pay for. However there are some resources worth investing in, such as an accounting software or an invoicing system or perhaps subscription to an industry magazine that will help you gain further insights. All of these may seem extravagant at first but once you understand how beneficial they could be to your overall process, it’ll be a game-changer and totally worth it. At the end of the day, as a business owner you want to free your time so that you can invest that free space doing something else that will expand your business and if investing a few dollars on such resources is helping you do that, then that’s good for your business.
5) Not managing finances: As an excited business owner, sometimes it may happen that you get carried away and end up spending way too much cash. While it is good thing to spend money on things that are essential to running a business, it is not wise to spend on other things such as decorating your office with fancy wallpapers or investing in a high-end computer system when you can make do with a simple laptop.
On the other side, underspending is also quite worrisome. As an entrepreneur you have to think like one. If you think that investing in something is worthwhile and will reap its benefit in the long run, then don’t hold back. Often times, businesses are not able to scale up when their owners feel that they should be spending just the bare minimum (when in fact what they need is to open their wallets a bit more than that)
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6) Insufficient marketing: So you have a great business plan and you’ve hired the right talent you could find, you have the necessary resources and the finances are taken care of correctly; but you still do not find your business taking off as expected. One of the reasons why this could be, is not marketing your business the way it should be marketed. Sometimes it is worthwhile getting in touch with an expert who can guide you through it all. You cannot be the jack of all trades, can you?
As a social media marketing company, we’ve helped businesses grow because that’s our job. As a business owner, you have to rely on somebody else at times to take your business forward. It may be a turning point for your business and can really get your customers talking and other potential customers interested.
Business is all about managing a problem and trying to solve it. If you are struggling with your business, may be this article helped you in determining (and fixing) what it is that you are lacking and how you can make up to it.
