Almost all entrepreneurs experience failure – not just once, but multiple times. Business is risky, and sometimes those risks escalate to cost business owners time, money, energy, Artificial Lift Systems and their dreams of success.
Unfortunately, the reason so many entrepreneurs fail is their belief that it can’t happen to them. You might be having this very thought – that you will be the exception, that your first business won’t fail. If you want that long shot to become more realistic, you need to read these tips and tricks for succeeding your first time around.
Equip Yourself With the Best Knowledge and Skill
The more you know about running a business, the less likely it is that you will forget or ignore a critical issue that will cause your business to fail. Few successful first-time entrepreneurs are kids just out of high school; it takes years to accumulate the right knowledge and skills to thrive as a business owner and leader. Plus, it takes pursuing the right kinds of experiences to ensure you are well-rounded enough to help your business thrive.
First, you should aim your education toward entrepreneurship. This means studying a complex business field, like finance, or even enrolling in a dedicated entrepreneurship program. You should also strongly consider enrolling in an advanced online MBA program, which enhances your business management abilities while you gain real-world experience.
Speaking of experience, after you graduate with your bachelor’s degree, you should immediately launch yourself into employment. Though employment isn’t where you see your career remaining for the long term, it is essential that you spend time working in the industry where you hope to launch your business. This will introduce you to industry standards, industry tools and other tactics useful to your future startup. For example, you may learn a lot about how startup finances work, how you can set up the various aspects of your business like opening a high risk merchant account for the initial days of your business, marketing, branding, and a whole lot more. Further, it will provide you with helpful contacts in the industry, whom you might convince to join you in your new small business or who might otherwise provide advice, resources and support as you begin your entrepreneurial endeavor.
Finally, before you step into the deep end of entrepreneurship, you should have some real-world experience in management. You might think you know how to lead a team, but you can’t be certain until you do it. Management experience will help you hone your ability to build realistic budgets, plan strategically, motivate, increase performance and more. Then, when it is your small business on the line, you will have a better idea of what to do right.
Avoid the Bad Kind of Business Debt
Funding mistakes topple more new businesses than any other issue. Therefore, you should devote time and energy to getting your funding right. Specifically, you don’t want to accumulate the bad kind of business debt – which is undoubtedly credit card debt. As attractive and convenient as credit cards are, they don’t facilitate business growth; their short-term and high interest rates will tank your finances fast.
Instead, you should pursue a reputable small business loan, ideally from an institution like the Small Business Administration that is dedicated to helping small businesses thrive. You should also take out a business line of credit, which will help you make big purchases (or recover from slow sales periods) when you need to.
Of course, there are other initial funding methods, like angel investors and venture capitalists. You can dabble into these areas if you feel your startup is appropriately attractive to these funding providers. However, you should never try to bootstrap a business fully or rely heavily on friends and family for funding. Both of these methods mix your professional life and your personal life unhealthily, causing stress on what should be your support system.
Outsource Your Business Operations
To avoid pitfalls with your first small business, embracing the concept of outsourcing is essential. Outsourcing allows you to delegate various tasks such as administrative work, financial management, QA testing, marketing, and other business operations to experts, enabling you to focus on core activities that drive growth and innovation. Let us understand this in detail.
Administrative tasks, including scheduling, data entry, and customer service, can be efficiently managed by virtual administrative assistants (or professionals of comparable caliber), freeing up your time for strategic planning and decision-making. Likewise, financial tasks like bookkeeping, payroll, and tax preparation can
be handled by outsourced professionals to ensure accuracy and compliance, reducing the risk of costly errors.
Outsourcing software QA testing can provide significant benefits for businesses looking to deliver high-quality software without overstretching internal resources. It allows companies to leverage the expertise of dedicated professionals, ensuring thorough testing processes and identifying potential issues early. This can lead to faster time-to-market, reduced costs, and improved user satisfaction. Even if you have an in-house team for QA testing, you can outsource backup QA testing services, which can serve as temporary assistance whilst a team member is unavailable, for example during parental leave, vacations, or sabbaticals. This saves you the cost of hiring a new team member every time one is unavailable.
What’s more? Outsourcing marketing activities, such as social media management, content creation, and digital advertising, to specialized agencies can enhance your brand’s visibility and engagement, leveraging their expertise to create effective campaigns.
As an illustration, if yours is a product-based company, the development process often includes coordination among various professionals skilled in hardware design and user interface development. In case of a lack of talent in IC programming, which often is crucial, due to various reasons like affordability, you can always consider outsourcing your programming services in order to test the code and ensure compatibility with hardware. This might avoid costs related to hiring as well as reinforce a seamless production process.
Put simply, this strategic approach can not only improve efficiency and productivity but also provide access to a wider pool of talent and resources, ensuring your business remains competitive.
Use Data to Enhance Your Decision-making
Finally, to set your small business out on the right foot, you should equip yourself with a wealth of pertinent data. Before you launch, you should have a business plan that includes a thorough analysis of your market, to include information like existing and emerging competitors, audience demographics, price point data and more. Research like this will guide your business planning and decision-making, so you can make strong, informed choices early-on for your business.
Even so, your data collection efforts shouldn’t cease once your operation is up and running. You should continue to leverage data as your business grows to ensure you are making optimal selections regarding sales and marketing tactics, product range, pricing and more.
Success as a small business owner isn’t about flash and bang; it’s about careful diligence for years before and after your startup launches. Even then, business success is as much reliant on luck as anything else. As long as you remain committed to your business idea and improving your own skills and knowledge, you should be able to stave off failure.
