What are some challenges of being an entrepreneur? While entrepreneurship can help you build your ideal lifestyle, starting a new business is by no means a simple journey. Entrepreneurs are constantly faced with new challenges and problems. In the world of entrepreneurship, failure can be almost inevitable. To overcome this, it is important to know the most common challenges and continually learn from your entrepreneurial experience. Over time, these seven listed here have shown up as the most common. It is possible to overcome them.
1) Financial Problems
Financial struggles are very likely, especially at the beginning. This possibility may even make a person avoid starting at all.
Although many businesses lack the necessary financial resources to achieve their growth goals, a business cannot exist without them.
However, there are different solutions to solve this problem, such as borrowing from family, obtaining available fundings or grants, using a personal investment, finding business angels and possibly, even an entrepreneurial bank loan.
2) Having A Good Marketing Vision
Another challenge you may face as an entrepreneur is improving and developing your business ideas and vision to predict the market. Having a creative idea is not always easy, but as an entrepreneur, you should always be a few steps ahead of others in planning your outlook.
Entrepreneurs should always see opportunities in the market and, as much as possible, predict the future to improve business prospects. To do this, we have no choice but to understand forecasting from a statistical point of view. A forecast is past and present data used to predict the future financial performance of a company. Entrepreneurs can calculate how much revenue they are likely to generate over time. A notable way of how to do this is the use of regression with statistical software such as SPSS, for example. SPSS software can provide data analysis and predictions for identifying certain groups.
3) Building A Team
Forming a team is a difficult task for all entrepreneurs. After reviewing the resumes, an entrepreneur should invite all possible candidates to an interview, to see who best fills their needs. This may take some time, but it will really be worth the effort.
When building a team, as an entrepreneur, you must make sure that the selected individuals are able to share your future vision. When they are in alignment with you, they will perform their duties with passion, interest, and be fully engaged. If this is not the case and they cannot understand your business ideas with enthusiasm, they probably will not be worthy of your team in the long term.
4) Finding Customers
One of the main problems in the way of any new small business’ startup is finding customers. In other words, customers may not be able to find a new startup website, available offers, and social channels very quickly, at first. This can actually be a very big fear for a lot of new entrepreneurs. It may even be enough to make someone stop before they have even started.
It can take a lot of time and it might even be expensive. But here are some ideas for low-cost strategies for customer expansion.
Developing networking plans, providing customer promotions, asking others for referrals, and having updated social media channels are just some suggestions to attract customers, as you continually scale up your business. Just remember to be patient. This will be an ongoing task, but very worth the time and effort. By providing your customers with value-added products or services, you can easily turn them into loyal customers.
5) Competitors
Most people are afraid of working with too many competitors and consider it a problem. But sometimes it is necessary to look at this matter from a different point of view. Competition is a measure of creativity and stimulating innovation. It is the competition that drives entrepreneurs to continually improve their services and products. They are also telling you that your idea is a good one. So, see it as something positive.
As a case in point, a company has little motivation to decrease its prices or enhance its products if it does not face competition. If there is just one vendor in the market, it is free to set higher pricing without worrying about losing customers to a rival.
The only thing you as an entrepreneur should consider when looking at any competition out there is to constantly identify the latest news and achievements in your market. Always keep your business industry knowledge and information up to date, so that you don't lose the ability to compete.
6) Time Management and Assignment of Tasks
Probably one of the biggest problems of starting a business for entrepreneurs is time management. Entrepreneurs must oversee everything. This can feel very overwhelming; however, it can be resolved.
To solve this problem, entrepreneurs need to constantly improve their time management skills. To begin with, you should make a list of all your annual goals. Then, divide them into smaller goals including monthly, weekly, and daily. Eliminate unnecessary tasks or delegate them to your team to save time. Delegation will not only save time, but it is, in fact, a great way to develop both your team and you professionally. Finally, in order not to deviate from the main path, measure and evaluate your performance at frequent, consistent intervals.
7) Leaving the Current Job
This may easily be one of the main reasons for the failure of many new businesses. Most entrepreneurs leave their current job to focus on their new small businesses without any prior planning and without enough – or any - future bank account savings. It is better to see all aspects properly before making a hasty decision and leaving your job. You should plan to have at least enough funds to support yourself for the next three plus months. Start your necessary steps on the side before you quit your current job.
Key Points for Readers
1. Money is not the only reason to become an entrepreneur.
2. Focus on what you are good at and leave out the things you don't know how to do.
3. Learn to manage your time and how to delegate, where possible.
4. Know when and which individuals to hire.
Priorities in Your Business
1. Keep pursuing innovation.
2. Constantly improve your website ranking on search engines like Google.
3. Advertise in your business industry from the very start.
4. Continue to reinvest in your business.
5. Always monitor customer satisfaction with any feedback received.
Best Plans for Company Growth
To scale your company quickly and securely, you will want to:
1. Encourage each customer to introduce your business to others.
2. Find ways to attract investors to help continue to establish your business.
3. Advertising should be your main arm of boosting sales and market development.
4. Develop a recognizable brand, because it can influence your business’ success.
5. Add algorithms and business intelligence. Do this by monitoring a trend using both Google Analytics and Google Trends. For example, most people search for a specific thing using keywords (SEO) in the market, so now you will be informed of this trend.
6. Create joint ventures with other companies to increase profitability. We can benefit from alignment with bigger companies to increase our customer base. How? We can focus on missing capabilities those bigger companies may not have. There are probably many niches we can fill, to create a better and unique market position.
Conclusion
In this article, Mohammad discussed the challenges of starting a business in general and how to overcome them. Entrepreneurs take risks because they're necessary to start and grow a business. It doesn't matter if this is your first entrepreneurial experience or if you have already had experience in this field; either way, you will face many challenges. Just keep in mind that these challenges are created to strengthen you. So, make sure to always reflect on every experience as something to learn and grow from, so that you can come out on the other end feeling proud and accomplished. And you will!
Your Author
Mohammad Zaripour. Mohammad is a dedicated CNIB staff member, who has been working in their Venture Zone since December 2021. His focus is on supporting and enabling entrepreneurs as they prepare to launch their businesses. With certifications in Google Digital Marketing, PMP, PMI-ACP, PSM, and EIT, Mohammad brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to his role. He holds a Master of Engineering in Technology Innovation Management from Carleton University. Those looking to learn more about digital marketing and building a successful business can follow Mohammad on Twitter, where he shares helpful tips and insights. For more information about his professional background and experience, visit his LinkedIn page.
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/mohammadzaripour 
Resources
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Kanchana, R.S., Divya, J.V. and Beegom, A.A., 2013. Challenges faced by new entrepreneurs. International journal of current research and academic review, 1(3), pp.71-78.
Jennings, J.E. and Brush, C.G., 2013. Research on women entrepreneurs: challenges to (and from) the broader entrepreneurship literature. Academy of Management Annals, 7(1), pp.663-715.