Over 627,000 new businesses open every year, but only slightly more than half make it past the five-year mark. Becoming an entrepreneur and building a startup company from the ground up comes with a myriad of challenges and unforeseen choices that can radically alter the path a startup takes. Here are a few of those challenges and how to overcome them to help you succeed in growing and scaling your new business.
1. Making Your Company Known
One of the biggest issues that new entrepreneurs face is getting the word out about their product or service. Those who have already been working in their industry for several years may use referrals and word-of-mouth to win new clients. But if your goal is to scale into a larger company or organization, you’ll need to put more effort into your marketing tactics. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.
SEO is valuable because it’s a tactic that increases the reach of your brand and cements your company as a trustworthy service provider in your industry. Through SEO you can gain an understanding of your customer’s intent and where they’re coming across information about your company in their buyer’s process, and build out that portion of your marketing funnel to give them more information on what your company does differently or persuade them to buy from you instead of the competition. If you use SEO efficiently, they’ll also be more likely to buy from you as you’ll have engaged them with content as soon as possible and lead them to decide that your company is who they should spend on.
A large portion of building credibility and authority in SEO is tied to link building, which is the process of gathering links to your website from other websites. The more high-value links you have to your website, the higher Google will rank you in search results, as they trust the authority of the pages that are linked to you and they share some of that prestige with your site. Startup link building can be a difficult process, but there are plenty of ways to get started that all involve creating high-quality content that’s relevant to the market you’re trying to reach.
2. Waiting for Results
When you start a new business, you’re working off of a lot of energy and momentum, which can hit a low point as your business grows and the economy fluctuates. The key to running a successful business is to have patience and a solid plan. A way to curb this impatience is to focus on the details or actions you can control. Whether that’s continuing to research new aspects of your product or service and innovate on them, or streamlining your process to deliver the best quality service to your clientele.
When you write your business plan, you should include an overview of what your company sells, how you plan on finding customers, and other details. Going back over this plan can help you determine your next steps and take actionable steps toward them while you wait for feedback on your product, or for your marketing to pull in prospective buyers.
3. Delegating Tasks
Some people work best as either freelancers or one-person companies. But as your company takes on more clients, it can be difficult to keep up with the workload without sacrificing the other things that are important to you. Although it may seem difficult to let go of some control, delegating tasks to someone else so you can focus on your clients will ultimately benefit your business.
Whether you decide to outsource a portion of your workload to freelancers and other independent contractors or hire in-house personnel, one of the fundamentals for hiring is to understand your strengths and weaknesses. Know what you’d like to continue focusing on and what you succeed at, and hire someone else to do the work you don’t have time for or struggle to accomplish.
But don’t hire just to hire. Building out the right team for your business is one of the key issues in scaling your company. New team members need to have the same vision and goal for the company as the founder, and this comes through a proper hiring process and utilization of your teamwork and collaboration skills. Your new hires should have specialized skills that you need at that moment, each role designed to get your product or service off the ground and into the hands of your customers.
Make Your Mark
Growing a startup is one of the most valuable experiences that forward-thinking individuals can have, but it comes with its downsides. Knowing how to face these challenges head-on and be able to properly market your company, use your time, and hire some help can mean the difference between a failed business and one you grow to a massive scale.
