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What can be better than being your own boss? You get to execute your own ideas, choose your own hours and bring in the profits. So why do many feel daunted by the idea of starting a business? And why do those who have taken the plunge encounter a host of entrepreneur problems?
While entrepreneurship can be rewarding, it also comes with a number of challenges faced by entrepreneurs. Merriam-Webster defines an entrepreneur as “one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise”. Risk is high on the list of entrepreneur problems; building a business from scratch can be an overwhelming prospect. What will your product or service be? To whom will you sell it? How will your business find clients? These and many other questions need to be answered by young entrepreneurs who are starting out. For this reason, it’s better to understand the main hurdles that entrepreneurs will likely encounter before you set out.
Examples Of Problems Faced By Entrepreneurs
Identifying various entrepreneur problems, including the unique challenges faced by female entrepreneurs, will help everyone make informed decisions, no matter how far along they are in the entrepreneurship game. What are some key challenges of entrepreneurs, and how should they be tackled? Here are some important points to consider:
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Having To Give Up A Steady Job
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Maintaining A Cash Flow
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Building Trust
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Managing Time Smartly
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Building A Team From Scratch
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Delegating Work
1. Having To Give Up A Steady Job
Starting a business and helping it grow steadily turns into a full-time job, leaving you no room for another. If you’re serious about running a company, you will be hard-pressed for time to allow for another career path. It might be feasible to work a day job when your business is in its nascent stages, but for your enterprise to flourish, you will have to give it all your attention and time. Giving up a steady paycheck and the comfort of a secure job for an uncertain dream is a big ask, especially for those who’ve never headed a business before. In fact, it’s one of the biggest challenges faced by female entrepreneurs, as women are rarely encouraged to take risks or follow their dreams.
Deciding whether to take such a leap of faith can be one of the trickier challenges of entrepreneurs. There are no clear-cut rules. The best way to approach this decision is to weigh all your options carefully and to listen to your intuition.
2. Maintaining A Cash Flow
Financial planning is a key part of running a business. Yet, managing and maintaining a steady cash flow is one of the more serious challenges faced by entrepreneurs. A regular stream of cash is vital for keeping small businesses afloat, but entrepreneurs often have to wait for extended periods of time to get paid for a job they’ve done. This is difficult because they too have to pay others—vendors, employees, contractors—apart from meeting their own expenses. Not knowing when, or if, a client is going to pay can be nerve-racking.
3. Building Trust
Planning and budgeting carefully can be helpful, but it won’t do away with worry over payments. Strategies for improving cash flow can involve asking for an advance, invoicing customers earlier than the usual invoice period and requesting instant payment upon finishing a project. Moreover, trust plays a big part in the solutions to such problems faced by entrepreneurs. If you build a good relationship with your vendors, you could request them to grant you extended invoice periods as you wait for payments from your clients to come in.
4. Managing Time Smartly
It’s common for new enterprise owners to wish they have more than 24 hours in a day. Among the challenges of entrepreneurs, time management is a significant one. One way to avoid feeling overwhelmed is to be clever about how you spend your time. Make lists of goals and prioritize your daily, weekly and monthly tasks according to those lists. Discard tasks that seem unnecessary on your path toward your goals, and keep asking yourself if you’re using your time wisely.
5. Building A Team From Scratch
Even those with experience in managing an enterprise face entrepreneur problems such as choosing the right people for the job. New entrepreneurs are likely to find it doubly hard. A candidate’s qualifications may not be enough to understand if they’ll be a good fit. You must also take into account their cost to business, their attitude toward your vision and whether they’ll be team players. Finding people who tick all these boxes is one of the bigger challenges faced by entrepreneurs.
6. Delegating Work
Even visionary entrepreneurs have trouble delegating. But to realize their vision, they must learn to get out of their own way. Among the many challenges of entrepreneurs is accepting that they need to delegate. As the business starts to grow, do yourself a favor by hiring on time, outsourcing jobs and delegating to people who do great work. While their methods may not match yours entirely, the results they get might benefit your business. Finding the best contractors may be part of the problems faced by entrepreneurs, as it involves higher costs, but the earning potential it creates makes it worth the expenditure.
Becoming Your Own Best Leader
Learning how to overcome the myriad challenges of entrepreneurs is crucial for excelling at the entrepreneurship game. Harappa’s Leading Self course is designed to help you cultivate a growth mindset and overcome obstacles keeping you from realizing your potential. Through this course, you’ll learn to embrace opportunities for growth, harness your skills and overcome barriers. Frameworks such as the Performance Equation and The Iceberg Model will equip you to fulfill your potential by reducing interferences and overcoming limiting beliefs.
So hurry and sign up for Harappa’s Leading Self course right away and set yourself on the path towards becoming a successful entrepreneur.
Explore Harappa Diaries to learn more about topics such as Problems Faced By Women Entrepreneurs, Need Of Entrepreneurship Development, Factors Influencing Entrepreneurship and How To Develop Entrepreneurial Skills to advance in your career.
