When it comes to starting a business, as exiciting as it may sound, there are many risks and challenges that you will face in your journey. Leon Smallberger gives some advice on how best to navigate these challenges.
Smallberger shares some tips and advice from his personal experiences, collected over the year from general life and business experience. When it comes to advice on starting your own small business, never discard any information from anyone, but choose carefully who's advice you follow. Remember that everyone's situation and experiences will be unique.
Getting started
Starting your own business can be both rewarding and stressful, how you find balance between these two extremes will be entirely up to you. You will need tenacity, perseverance and drive in order to run a business.
Be realistic
Be realistic, truthful and honest with yourself. It is not in every person’s nature to be entrepreneurial or a business owner. Running or owning a business makes no distinction between your work life and your personal life, so be ready for hard and taxing work. It may take years to find a work-life balance.
Start-up capital
Your start-up capital required will undoubtedly be larger than you can imagine or even what your calculations show. So be prepared for large expenses. Entrepreneurs are optimistic, excited and motivated at the start up stage of the business and overlook the numerous pitfalls. Allow yourself time and be very wary of your cash flow. Many successful businesses fail due to a lack of cash flow and not lack of profitability.
Handling stress
Stress in whatever form is destructive and all consuming. Financial stress is one of the worst stressors a business owner can experience. Stress can consume you to the extent that it dominates your thoughts and concentration and kills creativity. Ultimately, it affects your ability to deliver. Your most creative thinking will be derived from situations that are in themselves stressful but force you into thinking creatively and coming up with a solution.
Getting business
Unless you have something concrete lined up, don’t rely on your current contacts or existing client relationships for your business to succeed. These contacts may pay off at some point in the future but your network is not something you can depend on for your business to succeed. Plan to hit the ground running with a sound business development approach rather than hoping for immediate business from existing clients and contacts.
Running your business
Always run your business like a start-up, no matter how large it becomes. During the start-up phase, costs are always the highest priority. Spending is carefully considered and re-considered, teams, people and resources are low, and margins are high. Never deviate from this strategy as business owners tend to become more lenient once the business grows and cash flow becomes less of an issue.
When to start
There is never an “ideally” correct time to start a business! Potential and existing entrepreneurs tend to wait for the most opportune moment - the perfect moment, the product to be perfect, the environment to be perfect, finances to be more favourable or a better economy. Things will never be perfect and there will never be a perfect scenario. Don’t wait until something is perfect before you start or offer it to the market, otherwise you may be waiting foreer. Take what you have developed to your target market (even if it is only for feedback) as quickly as possible. You can then tweak and change it as required. You will get valuable market insight by taking this approach.
Challenges and obstacles
You have now taken the big step. You will face obstacles coming from competitors, other businesses, the economy, friends and even family. Statistically the entrepreneurial odds are not in your favour and despite all the effort, our current climate is not supportive of entrepreneurs or start-ups.
When you experience tough times, and you will, remember the very reason that you chose this road was because you have the drive and the vision that it takes to be an entrepreneur. Hold onto this during challenging times.
