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In the very first few years of a new business, there will come up problems and business often face a lot of different challenges. Some are harder than others to overcome and as a result of this, about 20% of small businesses fail by the end of their first year. By the fifth year, on average 50% go under and continues to rise into the tenth year to 80%.
For small businesses that aren’t a household name, finding new customers can be rather difficult when starting out. For the owner, there seem to be so many channels you can choose to focus on and how would one know what to prioritize and where to allocate the companies resources?
If at any time business owners feel overwhelmed, they should be seeking advice from professionals whether it be legislative or IT support, from overseas business to taxes, there are organizations that can help point the ambitious business owner in the right direction.
Here are some challenges from a long list that nearly every small business faces.
There has already been mention to the first issue that a business owner will face when the business is new. Customers. Unless there has been a huge marketing campaign done previously, new businesses with their products and services will have to follow an educated hunch and hope that it gains traction. Of course, it is not all just luck, craft an idea of what your target customers look like, what they do, where they spend time catering to potential clients and customers by building up buyer personas.
Spreading Brand Awareness
It sometimes seems like today’s biggest have popped up out of nowhere. How did they successfully become a household name? How did they grow so quickly? And more importantly, can your business grow like that too?
It goes without saying that with these companies’ hard work, failures and rejections happened behind the scenes. Usually, departments such as PR, co-marketing, and blogging are common ways to spread brand awareness. But even the home-worker can incorporate these are strategies for spreading the word about their company brand and building a great reputation that can start right away.
Hiring Talented People
Employing the right staff is often one of the biggest challenges for small businesses, especially when small business executives tend to feel under-resourced anyway. after-all, hiring new employees can be a complex process, and the cost of onboarding is an average of over $4,000 per new employee for most companies, following a wage and benefits. And if you don’t hire well, seeking employees can turn out to be very, very expensive.
Building An Email List
This isn’t explaining how easy this one is if it isn’t hard enough to build an effective email list already, with the conundrum of potentially losing customers if they think your business to be spam of some sort. On average, a small business email marketing database degrades by about a quarter each year? That means they will have to increase the email list by almost a quarter to just maintain its efficiency, never mind increasing it. It can be beneficial to check out a few email marketing software programs that have been built for this very thing and see if they can help the business in this department.
The best way to generate leads through marketing emails is to build an opt-in email list which would tell the businesses that the database is made up of subscribers who voluntarily give them their email address so they can send them production deals or services.
Although these are just a few common problems that small to medium business executives face on a daily basis. Do you have anything that you would like to add? Have you got any tips or want to add something that will help the new business owner progress? Share your comments in the section below.
