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Overcoming 6 Most Common Small Business Challenge
Owning and running a small business is as rewarding as it is taxing. When you run into a busy time of year or face an increase in demand, it might feel hard to run business as usual while maintaining your work-life balance. There are dozens of speed bumps you might face on a regular basis, but overcoming small business challenges is necessary to keep your company profitable.
Here are some of the most common small business challenges you may face during your regular operations and the ways you can resolve them before they become large-scale problems:
Attracting and Retaining Customers
No matter what industry you’re working in, it can be tough to bring on customers and keep them engaged in your services. Although it may seem appealing to limit your sales reach to new customers, doing so underestimates the value of current consumers. The book Marketing Metrics reported that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70 percent, while the chances of selling to a prospect is 5 to 20 percent. You can overcome the obstacle of gaining and keeping customers by developing separate marketing strategies that hit all ends of the sales cycle, from the prospect to the engaged, returning customer.
Filling Your Sales Pipeline
One of the major small business challenges involves building an effective sales pipeline. Tracking every stage of the sales funnel entails complete organization, from lead generation to the closing stages of business. Make sure your sales employees are actively engaging with potential leads rather than wasting their time on cold calls.
Maintaining Growth
If you’ve experienced a particularly profitable quarter, you want to keep business on the up and up. You can keep your business from plateauing by maintaining efficient operations. This may require you to be more proactive than reactive at times.
Finding and Hiring the Right People
Your business needs the right support to keep operations running smoothly. Without the right team of employees, your business won’t achieve its full potential of profitability and productivity. One major way of overcoming small business challenges in this area is hiring for quality rather than quantity. A qualified team of two may effectively create the same (if not better) results as a team of four that lacks experience.
Managing Cash Flow
No matter how great your business model is, poor cash flow can be catastrophic. Maybe you didn’t properly forecast your future sales volumes accurately, leading to massive overspending or underspending. Or perhaps you don’t have cash on hand in case of an emergency. Keeping your business successful requires you to stay on top of any possible financial mishaps and strategize your spending. Once you’ve gained control of these moving parts, you can overcome the cash flow obstacle.
Securing Funding
One of the most substantial challenges small businesses face is getting access to funding. When they want to grow their operations, expand their offerings, or bring on more staff, they will need access to adequate spending. Many business owners don’t know what to do to solve this issue. It’s not like they can magically appear on Shark Tank and ask a group of investors for a loan. However, getting access to funding doesn’t have to be difficult.
Overcoming Small Business Challenges with Alternative Lenders
Large-scale banks and the Small Business Administration ask for a lot of paperwork and a lot of time when making a loan decision. If you don’t think you’ll be able to secure financing from these sources, or you need access to cash immediately, apply for small business loans through an alternative lender like QuickBridge. We can help you get approved for a small business loan in as little as 24 hours – a much faster rate than those offered by banks and the SBA. Check out the broad amount of industries we serve to see how QuickBridge can accommodate your goals, making overcoming small business challenges viable.
