When people think about starting their own business, the dream everyone aspires to is prosperity and success: a brand that the world recognises, with the founder feted for their wise decisions. Unfortunately, that’s not the story for all business owners. Failure is sadly common, especially in the early days, and success exists across a whole spectrum, from barely scraping by, to providing a moderate income for those involved to those rare few businesses that capture the public imagination and scale wildly out in the world.
Today we’re taking a quick look at how those entrepreneurs prosper, in the hope of inspiring you to pursue you own dreams!
Building a Team
The people you work with are one of the most important assets you have, providing not just invaluable technical expertise and junior legwork but crucially insights and points of view you could never think of for yourself. Everyone is shaped by their experiences and if you hire people with different experiences and backgrounds you expand what your business is able to anticipate and turn more challenges into opportunities.
Hiring good people takes effort, from your C Suite execs down to customer service starters. It’s worth looking for a specialist recruiter for your most senior and specialised positions – executive search agencies like Savannah Recruitment specialise in finding a diverse pool of the best candidates so you have a real choice when you’re recruiting.
Planning
Flying by the seat of your pants certainly has its place in business, especially in the early days when it’s hard to predict what challenges you might face and what opportunities there are to take advantage of. The promise of a big client early on might mean dumping a lot of the planned work you were going to do on marketing and outreach to concentrate your resources on fulfilling this big contract. It’s for you to judge whether it’s worth sacrificing some early buzz and a diverse client base for the promise of this big payoff.
What you need is data to inform your plans. Data on your market and customers, data on your own workers so you know exactly what your business can provide and in what timescale inside and out, and data on businesses in general, so you can see how similar situations have played out and what the consequences have been.
Working with experienced board members, executives or investors can help to provide some insight if you’re a new entrepreneur, and market research firms can supply the raw data you need to start making informed decisions about what to do in order to prosper.
