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Happy National Small Business Week! While this is certainly a time to celebrate how far small businesses have come, this day of recognition also provides the opportunity to think about some of the challenges small businesses face.
Read on to learn more about some of the most common challenges in the world of small business – as well as how to meet them head-on.
Challenge 1: Managing and Understanding Finances
Any business needs enough money to stay afloat – but so do its employees. Not every small business has the luxury of multiple cash reserves on hand. This often ends up with a company founder working a job on the side while also attempting to maintain a business. Without focus from the business’ founder, the risk to fail is great.
What to Do
Managing money is certainly a challenge and can take a lot of time and energy away from tasks at hand. This is especially the case when the company founder splits his or her focus between running the business and earning money for it by other means. In these cases, a professional bookkeeper can help manage accounts, eliminating complexities and allowing business owners to see exactly where money should go.
Challenge 2: Staying Balanced
When managing all of the tasks required to run a small business, it can be hard to maintain an equal balance between growing the business and keeping the promise of quality service. It can prove difficult to grow without sacrificing the seemingly smaller aspects of small business, such as personal relationships with clients.
Now What?
Paying personal attention to detail – including to clients – is ultimately the deciding factor in quality of business and, in turn, business success. Consistently close attention to minutiae can, in turn, be detrimental to company growth. So where’s the middle ground? It’s actually quite visible.
The answer here is compromise: unhealthy perfectionism and poor work both prove to be huge problems on their own. It’s up to businesses to navigate the process of scaling up without harming the brand’s promise to its customers.
Challenge 3: Attracting Customers – and Keeping Them
When small businesses are faced with limited finances, it can be hard to do enough outreach to attract or retain customers, especially in comparison to larger companies with higher advertising budgets.
Solving the Problem
The answer here, of course, is strategy. Online marketing is crucial, including SEO, social networking, and email marketing. By creating high quality content and sharing it through multiple sources, your business will create buzz online that differentiates your brand from competitors.
