Business Challenges

Most people face challenges right from the start. First of all, how should they get business ideas? And how do they know that the business idea is any good? And if a business idea is good, can and should they pull it off? After all, most businesses take years to mature and can add tremendous stress and hardship to the life of the entrepreneur.

Then there is the challenge of financial risk. Should people quit their jobs? How will they support themselves or their families?

First time entrepreneurs have a difficult time finding business ideas that are appropriate for them. And when they do come up with a business idea, they are not always able to tell whether a business idea is good. Most business ideas tend to be bad or mediocre for a number of reasons. And often people realize that they were pursuing the wrong kind of a business only in hindsight.

Part of making sure you do not start the wrong kind of a business for you is to plan your business thoroughly. You do not have to have a formal business plan, but you certainly should do quite a bit of planning and due diligence before you actually start. Proper planning can save you time and money by preventing many mistakes.

To learn to plan, take a look at the business planning page as well as the business plan example on our site. If you are interested in learning more about business plans, check out the overview of my business plan book. And here is a business plan tutorial I have on YouTube.

For more business planning help, check out my business plan book and my book on how to start a business.

If the planning goes well, and you decide to actually get started with the business, the challenges are properly incorporating the company as well as making sure you validate the business idea well enough to take a big part of the risk out of it.

In our article about types of business ideas we discuss the different approaches for innovative ideas vs. ones which have been done before. While companies which have been done before such as restaurants, plumbers, and many other kinds of familiar businesses do not need too much validation, innovative and new types of business ideas do need market validation and testing to make sure the idea is viable before you invest your time, money and effort into it.

Additionally there are a number of legal issues that need to be done well when you start your business. Those issues tend to be company formation, trademarks, partner agreements, and various other legal protection mechanisms. We do not help with legal issues on our website or apps, so you must get help with those issues from other sources.

Even before you plan your business, one thing you should consider is which business niche to get into. Here is a tutorial on how to choose your business niche.

If you feel that you would like to talk to an experienced business person about your current business challenges, I am available to help you as a business coach on a one on one basis. For more details, check out this page where I explain how you can hire a business coach.

While I can help you with general business strategies, I specialize in Elearning, mobile apps, affiliate marketing, high-growth marketing strategies, and other online business models.

I created a number of online business courses that take you from the business idea stage to starting your business and growing it. For a full list of courses and discounts, check out the page with my full list of Udemy course coupons, learn how Udemy deals work and learn about the regular Udemy sales.

Once you begin your business, you need to get customers. Generally, you get customers by doing marketing or sales.

There are many kinds marketing. The main distinctions tend to be online marketing and offline marketing. Take a look at our marketing and advertising ideas article to get a sense of what would make sense for your business in terms of promoting it effectively.

Online marketing tends to consist of SEO, social media marketing, PR, viral marketing, video marketing, and similar techniques. Offline marketing tends to be person to person networking, presenting at events, hosting events, guerrilla marketing, handing out business cards and flyers.

Sales tends to be more straightforward. You can call people to sell things, you can knock on their door in an effort to try to sell things, or you can wait for people to come to you in order to make the sales.

Whatever you do to bring clients and grow your business, it is not easy and is one of the biggest challenges to making a successful business that there is.

To grow your business and afford the creating of the product or service, and to market it, you need resources. One of the biggest resource there is, is money. But the problem is that most small businesses face financial difficulties and hardship. While most businesses never do raise money, at one time or another, most entrepreneurs do wish they were able to raise it. There are many ways to do fundraising. Some of the ways you can raise money for your business are via donations, loans, grants, or an investment.

There are pros and cons to each of those methods. Those pros and cons are described in the respective pages for each of the four general ways to raise money. But raising money is a definite challenge. And since most businesses never do raise money, you may have to bootstrap the business which is another way of saying that you will need to find a way to make the business a success without money. So be resourceful and creative. It will go a long way and help you in many areas of the business.

And if you have marketing challenges, I recently talked to the founder of a company that is finding it very difficult to compete for SEO, and here is a post I wrote on some of the marketing challenges they are facing.

Article by Alex Genadinik