Entrepreneurs face huge challenges while starting up, both new and experienced. For instance, establishing a new brand in the market and attempting to outdo competitors is a continuous challenge whether you are starting up or ongoing as an entrepreneur.
Elon Musk is a world known entrepreneur responsible for historical breakthroughs in space technology today. His path to entrepreneurship began when he collaborated with his brother in 1995 to start a software company known as Zip2. Since starting his first company, Elon has developed into one of the most successful entrepreneurs leading companies such as PayPal, Tesla, and Space X. But it wasn’t all fairy tale for this tech junkie. It took ruthless daily business decisions, 80 hour work weeks, constant failure, and a whole handful of doubters to give Musk the fuel in his drive to succeed in becoming a global phenomenon to this day.
“If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic-being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.” – Elon Musk
Here are 5 of the most common struggles every entrepreneur needs to experience today:
1.Task Delegation
It becomes hard for entrepreneurs to accomplish all the tasks themselves. You need to outsource and have the tasks completed perfectly within the set time. As a young entrepreneur, you will lack the know-how in many areas in business and might need the help of experienced professionals to accomplish certain tasks for you. It, therefore, becomes a huge challenge for you to delegate tasks. Outsourcing requires contracts where you will have an understanding with the professionals undertaking tasks on terms and conditions. Making assumptions is a common mistake that most entrepreneurs make while delegating tasks. You need to avoid assumptions and follow the right procedures and paperwork. And if you don’t have them, learn to create them early to monitor your systems as you scale.
2.Choosing Products Or Services To Offer
Most new entrepreneurs do not know the products or services they want to offer. You need to research and be aware of various opportunities and identify a niche. Have an idea of the business before deciding what to invest in. Entrepreneurs who have funds but are unaware of the niche to start a business end up wasting the funds and facing serious debt, which can be damaging and delay your growth. You need to use tools such as SWOT and PESTEL to identify the various weaknesses and strengths possessed by different business ideas.
3.Marketing Strategy
Profit maximization is the main focus of any business. However, settling on the best marketing strategy needs proper planning and good decision making. You have to know the best way to market your products and services. One needs to choose online, traditional advertising, mobile or print. The modern technology has provided business owners with powerful online advertising platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube which reach a wider margin of people worldwide as opposed to traditional media platforms. You need to allocate a budget on marketing activities to enable for easy and smooth marketing of your products and services. Traditional forms of media have become very expensive and do not reach large numbers of people like social media platforms.
4.Capital
You will be faced with the challenge of raising enough capital to sustain the growth and expansion of your businesses. Most young entrepreneurs have ideas but lack the capital to start their business operations. Starting a business is one thing but expansion is another whole issue that might force you as an owner to close the business. Various ways to raise funds such as bank loans and loans from friends and family can serve as sources of financing, but the most effective way to fund business growth is through a growth model that is self-fueled. Keeping your customers happy and gaining new clients through a robust referral system will play a huge role in growing a business as opposed to expecting the business to grow into a multinational company overnight through ignorant spending and lack of research.
5.Lack Of Self Confidence
The life of an entrepreneur is filled with challenges which will test your confidence in business ideas and approaches. At times your ideas fail to meet their intended goals and objectives which tests your belief. We all know that entrepreneurship involves risks and the higher the risk the higher the gains. At times high risks attract high investments but end up failing which leads to immense losses. By having mentors and support from family and friends makes it easier for you to regain the confidence and give it another go. Furthermore, constantly coming up with innovative approaches to tackle problems in the business can help you regain your confidence and achieve your set goals and objectives.
My personal advice is to stick with your approaches and belief regardless of the number of time you will fail. Failure will help you to become better and experienced in handling future disappointments. Without failure, there is no learning, and without learning, there is no earning!