Let’s demystify the perceptions and myths around entrepreneurship on why most entrepreneurs fail while building and growing a startup.
Dropping everything and jumping into the world of entrepreneurship seems like a great idea. Starting a business sounds exciting, but like in any good story, the excitement comes from overcoming barriers and entertaining the possibility of failure. Entrepreneurship is a good story, but it does not always have a happy ending. If you are also planning to establish your own business, then you also need to know why most entrepreneurs fail and the reasons why entrepreneurship is hard.
Let’s look at the top five challenges that entrepreneurs face in their journey of starting and growing a business.
- Self-doubt
One of the major reasons why most entrepreneurs fail is their internal struggle and self-doubts. The constant self-doubt keeps your morale down and makes you question if you have it in you to succeed. Notably, if left unimpeded, self-doubt can destroy you and make you a negative and depressed person. Such a person can never become a successful entrepreneur.
The solution to this is to learn something new for at least an hour a day. You can read books, listen to audiobooks and spend some time following the pages, articles, and stories of successful entrepreneurs. One of the best ways to eliminate self-doubt is to get to know about others who have done it and get the belief that if they can do it, you can too.
- Handling Difficulty
Another big challenge for entrepreneurs is handling the difficulties that come while running a business. You will definitely come up with huge compliance and taxation. Navigating the business such complex structures will be anxiety-inducing and sometimes depressing. In the initial days, work will come in small chunks with little product and services orders.
The solution to managing difficulties is that you have to work very hard. This would mean working on the weekends, early mornings, late nights and getting some work done while you are waiting for something.
Building A-team
Entrepreneurship is not a job. But for several years, it feels like a high-stress job with multiple bosses (your customers), and you will feel like the captain of the ship with no crew members. Some people eventually grow out of this, but some people get stuck forever as they fail to build an A-team.
An A-team is a team that takes good care of your business and customers as much as you do. When you start building an A-team, things will slowly start getting easier, and you can focus on the long-term vision and growth of the company rather than solving urgent but trivial things in the day-to-day operations of the business.
While making such a team, the first thing you need to take out of your mind is that you are building a business for your personal growth, wealth, and profit. Notably, you cannot attract an A-team with such priorities. If you want to form an A-team and attract top talent for your business, you have to have a higher goal and vision of making a huge impact on the world. Always remember that a purpose-driven business attracts an A-team.
Managing Close Relationship
Many small business owners find it difficult to build and manage close relationships. Entrepreneurs have their minds constantly bustling with numerous ideas, things to do, concern and excitement about the future. It is always like having a few applications running in the background all the time. If you are someone who is married or have strong personal relationships or responsibilities at home, then entrepreneurship can be hard if your partner does not understand your work and your mindset.
At this time, your partner or some other family, friend, or relative needs to understand your mental state and become extremely supportive so that you can give most of your time to your business so that it can thrive properly. There is no such thing as a work-life balance for entrepreneurs because work is life for the initial stage of the business.
Manage Finance and Cashflow
A business is just like a plant with many parts. All the parts grown together properly and equally build a strong and productive output. A business also needs input. The input can take the form of capital, manpower, focus, creativity, and teamwork. The output is revenue and profits.
A lot of entrepreneurs end up feeding too much to the business at a very early stage, and then the business gets sick. It takes a lot of strong decisions and instinct to manage capital, cash flow and manpower at the early stage of a business. The basic reason why entrepreneurship is hard is the imbalance between the input and output, eventually causing the business to fail. When the output is less than the input for a long enough time, you end up with a business that is dead. Therefore, you need to manage both input and output in a proper ratio so that your business does not fail.
Precisely, there are several reasons why most entrepreneurs fail, but the above mentioned are the most common ones. You need to address these difficulties and challenges to make your business strong in the initial stage.