How to Overcome the Six Common Challenges all Business Owners Face
Owning a business is the best ‘playing field’. It is the ultimate challenge.
As a business owner you are driven to bring your vision into reality and when that happens, not only is everything changed for the better, you discover so much more about yourself, your community and the world you live in. Building a business is a transformative process, not transactional.
Everything you do IN your business must engender trust. If you apply my suggestions below your actions will help create the environment for trust to flourish. Without trust, all of your endeavours will be wasted.
There are six common challenges that business owners face. I have described these below together with some simple guidelines of how to overcome them the next time you are faced with them.
There is a reality about being a business owner that can be hard to live with. To build a business that works successfully, requires you to overcome a multitude of obstacles and challenges that you did not see on day one. It may feel like you have to break through another brick wall with each challenge. With resilience and determination, each time you grow and learn.
The reality is that the path to owning and running a six or seven-figure business will be filled with new obstacles and challenges every time you overcome the one in front of you now.
There is a certain element of ‘groundhog day’ to running a business. Every time you master an element of running a business, you immediately become the student of overcoming the next challenge. And the next challenge did not exist for you until you had overcome the previous one.
To get real joy running your own business, you have to know how to run a business, which isn’t necessarily what you think it is. If you run on the premise that you don’t know how to run a business, you’ll always be on the right path.
The six common challenges
Click read more to discover three tips on how to overcome the challenges and understand the barriers that get in the way.
- Are you feeling uncertain and hesitant – struggling to take action? READ MORE
- Do you feel you lack self-belief/confidence – feel unmotivated? READ MORE
- Are you making the best use of time and managing stress – finding it difficult to focus? READ MORE
- Have you built effective working relationships – do you delegate effectively or resort to micromanagement? READ MORE
- Are you inspiring and motivating your team & improving performance and dealing with the responsibility and pressure of employing people? READ MORE
- Struggling with being an effective leader – unable to express your values to your team to influence behaviour? READ MORE
As you grow and scale your business these challenges will re-occur. Each time you will be better prepared and you will overcome them faster. The trap to avoid is to believe that they will never happen again.
The Leadership Paradox
After working with me for a short while, a beauty salon owner employing 6 therapists, four of whom were older than they were, made this statement:
“I always thought I had to have all the answers because if I didn’t I would look stupid and that would undermine my position. Now I realise that if I ask the questions, everyone in my team can contribute and I am the one leading the conversation.”
Being a leader does not mean you have all of the answers. It means that you have chosen to be responsible for the care of everyone you employ, for being the best leader you can be and for never giving up. It is about having a stand for something you believe in that you can share with others, so powerfully that they will join you on the journey.
If I had the chance, I’d tell myself aged 31, which was when I became the leader of my first business, three morsels of advice. They would be:
- Hire people who are better than you at everything, but especially who are better than you at the things you struggle with.
- Whenever you want someone to do something for you, explain the outcome you want to achieve and ask them how they could make it happen. So much more productive than telling them what to do!
- Be kind to everyone. There are very few people that will go out of their way to do you harm. The majority want to contribute to you and see you succeed. When you meet the negative red lighters, be kind and move along. Don’t give their negativity and fear any oxygen.
I wish you well in Building The Business That Works For YOU!
If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.