Running a business can be a high pressure, stressful occupation. You know all too well that each decision you have to make carries a weight of responsibility – to your own family, to your employees and their loved ones, to the customers who rely on you, and to the future of the business. Decisions you take today can help or harm your prospects for years into the future!
With all that weight hanging on you, sometimes the challenges of running a business can feel insurmountable. To help make life easier, let’s take a look at some of those challenges today and some ways you can give yourself a better chance of facing them successfully.
The Competition
One of the biggest challenges are rivals – whether they’re new businesses trying to secure a share of your customers, or bigger, more established brands that you need to find space among.
Working with consultants to generate a competitor strategy analysis can help here. When you can make some informed guesses about what your competitors might be planning, you can plan around it more effectively – finding the spaces where you can make the most impact and create the most success!
Growth
Growth is important for all businesses but that doesn’t mean that all growth at any cost is well worth it. Trying to grow in the wrong way or at the wrong time can leave overstretched and in danger of collapse, or (perhaps more seriously) do irretrievable damage to your brand.
Strategy planning can help you identify what healthy growth looks like for your business, and set the milestones and checks you need to make before you commit.
Understanding Your Customers
There’s almost no end to the challenges and problems you can generate for yourself if you don’t put some effort into understanding your customers.
If you don’t know who’s willing to buy your product, where they are and how they think, it’s almost impossible to sell to them. You could end up opening a shop on the wrong side of town, with adverts in papers they don’t read and on social media networks they don’t use, with prices they can’t afford packaged in an experience that repels them.
Partnering up with a market research agency helps you understand the people in your audience, and tailor your business to make them welcome. This can result in increased spending from the customers you already have as well as an influx of new custom into your business!