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How to Deal With Four Pressure Points Most Entrepreneurs Face

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By Kayla Matthews

Amidst the growth of successful startups and the fame of their owners, many young people are finding entrepreneurship an increasingly attractive option. While it’s certainly possible to build an impressive business from scratch, it’s not as easy as it may seem.

Entrepreneurs face many challenges that affect not just themselves but also the overall success of their companies. Learning to manage these challenges is a crucial part of being an entrepreneur. However, if you’re not prepared for them, they can feel overwhelming.

To increase the likelihood of your business’ success, you need to be familiar with the common problems entrepreneurs and their businesses face so you can plan to handle them ahead of time. With that in mind, here are four pressure points entrepreneurs commonly encounter and a few strategies to tackle them.

1. A Lack of Funding

Starting a successful business requires a substantial financial investment. Most entrepreneurs don’t have access to the kind of capital they need to fund their businesses on their own. Even so, 80 percent of entrepreneurs use their personal funds to start their companies.

Though it’s good to invest your own money into your business if you can afford to do so, other financing options are available. To protect yourself from potentially life-shaking financial losses, you need to plan ahead and make the most of potential sources of funding. Loans, crowdfunding and money from investors can all help you launch your business without putting your family’s security at risk.

In addition to seeking out sources of supplemental funding, entrepreneurs worried about financial security should set aside money in personal savings in case the business’ budget tightens down the line.

2. Chronic Stress and Overworking

Because they tackle so much every day, entrepreneurs are at risk for chronic stress and other mental health issues. Not only is this a concern for the health and happiness of entrepreneurs, but it can also negatively affect their businesses. An overly demanding, negative or competitive attitude can permeate a company and bring down other employees, as well.

If you’re one of your business’ only employees, you’ll be tackling a huge portion of all tasks. If your entire financial and professional well-being relies on the success of your company — that’s a lot of pressure. Entrepreneurs in these high-stress roles should use some relaxation hacks to avoid burnout.

To prevent additional stress, pay attention to how much you work. Limit your work week to a reasonable number of hours and entirely separate your work and home lives. If you can, delegate tasks to another employee so you can spend your time as effectively as possible.

3. Irresponsible Scaling

Startups can grow fast, which is exciting. However, fast growth requires an entrepreneur to be extra conscientious, as irresponsible decisions made during the scaling process can sink a business equally fast.

Most businesses should grow steadily not swiftly. Though your startup may need to increase its size quickly, decisions made about hiring, firing and spending should all be made thoughtfully.

As you grow your business, think about the company culture you want to foster. Hire highly qualified candidates you want to stick around and fire employees who are causing difficulty as soon as you notice a problem. Spend frugally — even when it seems you don’t need to — to assure your company’s ability to continue growing a year or more into the future, when things might not be going as well.

4. Poor Ethical Choices

Another often overlooked problem faced by entrepreneurs is the temptation to skew from ethical practices and founding missions. Because startups and small businesses are personal affairs grown from scratch, entrepreneurs sometimes struggle to draw the line between what is ethical and what is not.

Nepotism, failure to accurately report income and co-mingling of business and personal finances are all common ethical conundrums entrepreneurs face. Though one misstep here and there may seem insignificant, they can come back to haunt the company in the long run.

To avoid ethical problems in your company, it is best to establish procedures and codes of conduct at the very beginning. You should always consult with an accountant or lawyer to ensure all of your business’ finances are being properly handled.

Running a business is difficult, especially if you’re doing it on your own. Luckily, by preparing for these common challenges, you can start your business on the path to success.

 

About the Author: Kayla Matthews writes about communication and workplace productivity on her blog, Productivity Theory. Her work has also appeared on Talent Culture, MakeUseOf, The Muse and Fast Company.

Featured Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash

How to Create a Healthy, Successful Work Environment

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There are plenty of factors to consider when it comes to business success: finances, networking, expansion, etc.

However, while these are important matters, there is one matter that is usually overlooked even though it has the ability to make or break the company—your workplace’s atmosphere.

The health of your company is dependent upon the health of your team, for your business will only go as far as your team promotes it.

Here are a few tips to creating an inviting, successful work environment:

1. Organize

Because there often feels like there is too little time in a day to accomplish everything you need to, you often spread yourself and your employees too thin. Instead of focusing 100 percent of your attention on one task at hand, you spread your focus over too many issues, which leads to disorganization and poor business performance.

Instead, set a schedule and stick to it. Be organized about what needs to be done, when it needs to be, and how it should be done. Set the precedent for your workplace by being organized and delegating tasks efficiently. Do an online company check to see how other business competitors are managing and learn from their actions.

2. Reduce Stress

Whether your business is a brand new start-up or a well-oiled machine, it is crucial to alleviate employee stress. A chaotic atmosphere is overwhelming, which can lead to severe stress. When you and your team are under duress, you are more susceptible to sickness, to financial errors, and business mistakes, among others. According to a Harvard Medical School study of stress, stress can often harm a person “physically, emotionally, and psychologically.”

Getting a handle on stress is the first step. Find a technique or activity that relaxes you and work that into both your routine and your team’s routine. Even in a high-pressure work environment, make sure you emphasize the importance of taking breaks during the workday and relaxing.

3. Goal Oriented

Establish goals and deadlines for you company. You can easily track your company’s success when you have goals that are measurable. Moreover, goals and deadlines help to keep you and your team focused on the tasks at hand. Begin by establishing (on paper) goals you want to accomplish six months or a year from now. Create incentives for your team to keep them working hard and focused. For example, offer your team a bonus if you reach your financial goal. It will keep both you and your team motivated while furthering your business’s success.

4. Comfortable Environment

An environment conducive to success will motivate you and your team. The workplace should be efficient and comfortable—emotionally and physically. Keep the office space at a comfortable temperature and at a comfortable mood. Stress the importance of being a team, which will hopefully dispel any negativity or competition amongst co-workers. Additionally, try to make the office space relaxing by making it as bright and airy as possible and having a designated area as a break room.

Image Source: www.wgal.com

About the Author: Ted Levin is a freelance journalist covering business topics for a variety of websites. He enjoys writing about startup challenges and company culture. 

Working Moms That Are Making a Difference

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Often that big idea strikes, and it’s those take charge people that follow them through to fruition to create a successful small business.

In many cases, those people are moms that see an opening and a need for a certain niche, and then turn it into something big.

In doing so, these women don’t give up their “momminess,” they just add “mompreuneur” as one of the many hats they wear.

It All Starts With Passion

The key to becoming a successful small business owner is doing something you love and find passion in. Being good at it helps, too.

Whether you are artistic, practical, crafty or persnickety, you probably have some good ideas rolling around.

Check out these notable moms who have started small businesses and then turned them into great big giant businesses:

  • Heather Allard is a mom of three and successful entrepreneur who, among other successes, is the inventor of Swaddleaze and Blankeaze, wearable swaddling blankets sold in more than 200 stores around the world, including some of the big name catalogs like One Step Ahead. She saw a need when her children were young to find something to help them sleep, and followed up on it, turning her blankets into a small business and then a thriving company with a worldwide market. She also began TheMogulMom.com, a community website for momprenuers.
  • Kelly Lester is another mom who saw a hole and filled it. She is the owner and creator of EasyLunchboxes.com and Art Plates. Art Plates was created after Kelly noticed the bland light switch plates everywhere, so she designed plates with a creative flair. Later, as her children brought their lunch to school, she wanted simple and healthy food without all the extra packaging, hence EasyLunchboxes. Now she owns a top seller on Amazon.com.

Both of these women used their momminess to spot a need for something useful to their families, and then used their drive and creativity to fill that hole, tuning a vision and a need into successful businesses.

Social Media is a Great Marketing Tool

Another thing both of these moms, along with many other small business owners, did was use the heck out of social media.

With blogs, websites, online ordering and social media, they marketed their product and themselves. Moms also usually have great networks, an essential piece of starting a business and getting your name and product out there.

Small businesses begin with a vision and a passion.

With those two things, and a thirsty drive and maybe a Facebook or Pinterest page, your creative insight could turn into a successful small business, and you will still be home to cook dinner for your family and maybe squeeze in a soccer game.

And if all goes well, your small business may end up being not as small as time goes on.

Photo credit: liberatingworkingmoms.com

About the Author: Heather Legg is a writer and mom of two, who covers a variety of topics ranging from parenting to social media to how to become a surrogate mother.

What is Missing? Are you Working Smarter – Not Harder?

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By Deb Bixler

Entrepreneurs are a determined group of people. A home based business owner will work to the point of exhaustion to make her business successful.

The thing is that entrepreneurs who learn to work smart are the ones that find much more success than the ones who just work hard. When you know how to add what your home based business is missing to make it successful, you can spend more time growing that business and less time worrying about how much money you are losing.

Word of Mouth

The fastest way to make your business successful is to get other people talking about it.

The best way to do that is to talk about your business every chance you get without being pushy. If you do it right, you will get people to ask you about what you do and open the door for you to discuss your business.

For example, if when someone asks you what you did over the weekend, you tell them that you had a blast, made some money and met some wonderful new people at your direct sales event, then you may create curiosity.

Curiosity is what gets them to ask you how you did it. After that the door is opened for you to talk about your business.

The goal is to sprinkle one liners in your conversation all the time that are generating interest so that people ask you to tell them more. That is smart!

Create Your Business Internet Presence

Is your small business missing the complete internet presence it needs to make it successful? A complete Internet marketing program for your company should include your own website, a page on each of the top social networking websites and a blog.

Once you have all of these in place, you need to add new content and work on these sites every day. The more work you put into your internet presence, the more return you will get in the form of new customers and more revenue.

Even if you are affiliated with a direct sales company that is well branded on the web, you should be consistently putting time into using the internet to connect the web for YOU!

When an independent home business consultant connects the web they become more powerful.

Business Urgency With Seasonal Products

home business urgencyThere are a lot of ways to keep people interested in your business all year round, but the most effective way is to offer full lines of seasonal products that people need and want.

Everyone loves Christmas decorations during the holidays, so you need to carry them. During the summer, people want to cool off and things they can put in their yard or garden to make them unique.

There are many ways to establish your business urgency that you can tap into:

  • Do your specials reflect the seasonal urgency?
  • Do you have expiring products?
  • Is a new catalog coming out?
  • Is there a different business theme each month?
  • Or can you create a new theme each month?

Your Passion and Enthusiasm

Nothing spreads word of mouth advertising faster than a business owner who is enthusiastic about what she does. If you are in the home sales industry, then you need to be enthusiastic about each of your events.

It is true that enthusiasm is contagious and that people will talk about you and your business in a positive way to others if you make them feel good about what you do, but think about what sets you apart and how you can convey that passionately to everyone you meet.

Sometimes it can be the smallest details that make your business attractive to customers. If you want your business to be successful, then you need to analyze it to find out what is missing and then fill in the empty spaces. The more smart work you put into your business, the greater the financial returns will be.

Author’s Bio:
Deb Bixler retired from the corporate world using the proven business systems that made her a success working for others by incorporating them into her home business. In only 9 months Deb replaced her full time income with the sales and commissions from her home party plan business. Find her on Twitter at: http://www.Twitter.com/debbixler

Show your Authenticity; Monkey with your Business

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by
Rosemary O’Neill

“True authenticity is a lack of perfection,” said architect Gil Schafer in the June 2012 issue of Architectural Digest. He was referring to a beautifully designed home, but the same principle applies to the beautifully run business.

The architect mentions, in the same interview, that he loves to include accents that are off-kilter, or “monkeyed with.”
Yes! I say. Exactly.

Show Your Authenticity. Humans Aren’t Perfect

Should a small business owner try to emulate the stilted language of a Fortune 500 on their website? Should an entrepreneur build a carefully crafted facade of social media perfection? No. Humans aren’t wired that way, and we have a hard time relating to businesses that are wired that way.

That doesn’t mean you can ignore the importance of copywriting, or that you can abandon business niceties altogether, and it certainly doesn’t mean you can show up at a presentation in your PJs.

But as a small business owner, you have a golden opportunity to show your human side, to be authentically you, as you conduct business. There’s no 50 page guidance document holding you back. If you screw something up royally, just apologize.

Embrace your lack of perfection. Celebrate it!

How to Be Off-Kilter On Purpose

Some inspirational ideas:

  1. I recently ordered some iPhone lenses that came with a tiny plastic dinosaur in the box, for no apparent reason. Photojojo.com made me smile.
  2. The AppSumo site has a funny, sometimes bizarre sense of humor, and a readily distinguishable “voice.”
  3. A local Seattle promo design shop (the fun folks at B-Bam!) caught my undivided attention last month by sending me a Christopher Walken t-shirt out of the blue.

Are you striving for B-school perfection? Stop it, and release the monkeys! Your customers will thank you for it.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Open Letter to Entrepreneurs: You Don’t Hold a Monopoly on the Right Answers

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

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You want a new Web site. You’re the boss and the company needs a new site. The existing one is home to static and dated talking points and lately you’ve begun to suspect that it is shouting at visitors and is thus, not developed with an evolving 2.0 culture in mind. There’s nothing, you conclude, social about. Your wife, mother-in-law and golf buddies all agree. You’re the boss and this is your mandate.

You want the thing redone and you want it redone now. Details are someone else’s problem. That’s what you pay the worker bees to do. You make the demand, they make it happen. You don’t care how; you just want the darn thing done and done well. You assign a small gaggle of your most qualified people to the task and they immediately spring into action. At the outset however, you make it clear that you want every phase of the project to pass through you before moving through each milestone. You’re Teddy Roosevelt. That’s just the way it is.

The talented group you’ve assembled begin doing all the heavy lifting as you expect it to be done. They do the research. They poll the best resources. They draft the Gantt charts and project time lines that denote, in graphically rich detail, the mile markers that will comprise the job’s lifespan. They have drawn up the wire frames, and the site map too. Nothing is left to guesswork. Your people got it right the first time. And you insist on being involved in every discussion.

The presentation

You call a meeting to review the team’s progress. The team sits down with you and proposes the solution as outlined in the project management materials and research data they’ve spent the previous week developing. The team is pumped. They know they nailed this thing and confidently cannot wait to see your reaction. Your project lead places the plan in front of you and you dig in, allowing her no opportunity to present. You give the proposal a flagrantly cursory look and are quickly ready to respond.

Here’s your appraisal:

The wire frames are bland and unsexy and the sitemap is nothing more than a confusing bunch of boxes with if statements peppered throughout.

Hmmm. The timeline calls for a 12-week project lifespan. 12 weeks, you exclaim, seems an excessive period of time to launch a new Web site. You have no prior experience launching Web sites, but that doesn’t stop you from being thoroughly convinced that you’re right to expect and demand it be done faster.

You don’t known what the terms, CMS, 301, 401 or Gantt all mean and that frustrates you. Instead of learning however, you use your entrepreneurial brawn to deliver a brief and condescending lecture to the lead on why spelling things out in plain English was not achieved and time, consequently, has been wasted. Your untrusted lead cautions you that these materials are internal project guides, intended for the technical eyes of the team and not necessarily a high level presentation meant for non-technical leadership. As the lead, you assure the boss that you’re trying to explain things in digestible terms, but the boss filibusters time and again and silences you’re every effort to simplify the conversation.

Intimidated further by your lead’s sensible rebuttals, you’re the big cheese you recall. So you dig your increasingly fragile heels in and quickly, loudly move on, even more confused now than you were before your initial objection to the amount of nerdy mumbo jumbo in the plan.

Suddenly it dawns on you.

Where’s the layout concept? “What’s this thing going to look like?”, you ask the team. The lead explains that this is a planning meeting and in the timeline spreadsheet, all of these milestones are addressed in their logical order. This frustrates you even more and you again explain to the team that you think 12 weeks is excessive and you now begin to suspect why. All this planning. All these spreadsheets (one in total, mind you). All these wire frames are giving you a headache. There’s no fun in any of this! You insist on seeing ‘something’ (a layout) within the week.

The team lead tries again to explain that designing the creative at this stage puts the sensible order of milestones grossly out of sequence and thus, hinders the team’s ability to get things right. You scoff and launch into a less-than succinct rant about how you built the company and how you met deadlines and adapted to ungodly pressures in far less time than this project asks for. The team tunes you out and, one by one, slowly begin to accept that you don’t give a darn about their expertise in designing and developing great Web sites. You don’t notice, of course, that your team has abandoned you, because you are too busy being certain that this situation is not unlike any other professional crisis you’ve experienced and in each of those, you were 100% in the right. You merely want to control every facet of the job and consequently grant no one beneath you the authority to succeed on terms unfamiliar to you.

10 Months Later…

The site was designed according to your project management sensibilities. It possesses all of the social channels you demanded it possess. It even went live ahead of that senseless 12 week calendar your former team lead recommended. Oh yeah, she quit like six months ago. If you had listened to her, you ponder, you might still be waiting for a site to go live. Your wife and golf buddies think it rocks and while you now have Twitter, Facebook and YouTube profiles, you have no qualified traffic hitting your pages and you’ve ultimately learned nothing from the exercise.

Two Years Later…

You’re broke and out of business. You’re getting older and you haven’t the fundamental computer savvy to impress interviewers. You have enormous debts and the culture that rewarded your business ideologies so many years earlier has now made you virtually unhirable. Humility sets in if you’re lucky and it is then, if you’re luckier, that it dawns on you that you don’t possess a monopoly on the right answers.

That’s when you learn to listen again.
Listening leads to life-long learning.
It’s your chance to start over.

—–

Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: bkang83

Thanks, Scott!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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