Startups
4 Major Challenges All Businesses Face
It’s one thing to start a business. It’s quite another to make it successful. Success is a rough road, full of many twists and bends and no small number of obstacles along the way. There are a number of obstacles that all businesses face, regardless of their size or past success record.
Knowing what they are and being prepared for them will make you and your business less prone to failure and more likely to weather the storms that will inevitably befall it.
Here are a four major challenges all businesses face:
1. Depending on small number of high-paying clients
If the success of your business rests on a small number of high-paying customers or clients, it is set up for failure, regardless of how stable the client relationship(s) may seem. You owe it to yourself and to the health of your business to figure out a way to reach either a broader audience or more people and businesses within your targeted demographic and aggressively market to them.
If you feel like you don’t have the resources to properly manage a new influx of business, consider outsourcing the bulk of the responsibility to an outside entity that understands your business and with whom you can communicate consistently and effectively.
Virtual assistants and receptionists are a great place to start, but you can also farm out specific tasks to freelancers or agencies that specialize in the specific tasks for which they are hired. That way, if a major client disappears, you can also easily downsize your workforce without having to struggle with layoffs and the expenses that arise from them.
“Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.” – Napoleon Hill
2. Insufficient money management
How many hats do the people on your accounting team wear on a daily basis? What other responsibilities get heaped on them when the work starts piling up? More importantly, how is this forced lack of attention to the numbers affecting your bottom line?
Most businesses think it would be too expensive to have the ideal number of staff to run things efficiently. The truth of the matter is that not having enough people keeping tabs on your company’s money is likely costing much more than you think.
It is yet another example of how outsourcing part of the workload that may not be specifically part of your full-time staff’s job description can actually save you money in the long run by allowing your onsite staff to stay focused on the actual details of their jobs.
3. Diminishing quality in the midst of growth
When you only have a few clients to serve, it is easy to provide top-quality customer service. As your business grows, however, it can become more and more difficult to maintain the same service standards. When you start dropping the ball on the people who helped get your business off the ground, it can only spell trouble over time.
Having access to additional help when you need it can alleviate the stress of taking on more work over time. Hiring temporary help while you expand your staff can keep things on a more even keel and allow your most important clients to keep receiving the same level of quality service they’ve come to expect.
“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” – Henry Ford
4. Diminishing accessibility
When your business is new and you only have three clients paying all the bills, it’s easy, or at least easier, to ensure that they get the kind of personal, immediate service that you identify as ideal. As you grow, those same clients start getting met with a lot more phone trees and voicemail, and it can have a very negative effect on how they view your customer focus.
If you want to continue to provide the same consistent service over time, you need a plan that allows you to grow quickly and handle incoming inquiries the same way you always have. If your customers have grown accustomed to a live voice answering your phone and one day they’re met by a phone tree or voicemail, you have a problem.
They will rightly begin to reconsider just how committed you are to them and how much less so you will be a year from now. To eliminate that worry from the equation, it is wise to have a plan in place where your phones are always answered and your clients and customers always get the same consistent level of service.