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Owning and managing your own business is a rewarding career, but entrepreneurial success doesn’t come without obstacles along the way. In the highly competitive and evolving world of business, facing and overcoming challenges is a normal part of everyday life for up and coming entrepreneurs.
Twill recently interviewed a group of successful entrepreneurs who shared their business success stories, including the obstacles they faced to get to where they are today. We’ve identified 4 common obstacles faced by our successful entrepreneurs and their first-hand advice on how to best overcome them.
1. Creating a team culture
Nowadays, creating a good team culture is very important to attract and retain the best talent. Building relationships with your colleagues is critical to creating an environment where you and your people can thrive.
Alessandro, who owns a pasta delivery service, found building a team culture challenging, especially with ‘a lot of new people joining the business due to the global pandemic’ and ‘lack of face-to-face interaction’.
With the restrictions imposed by lockdowns and the increasing popularity of remote working, many up and coming entrepreneurs are working with people across the country and fully embracing team culture.
Alessandro’s advice to keep it going, be ‘proactive’ and try to ‘engage your team’ as much as possible, whatever that means for your business.
2. Balancing other priorities
Owning and running your own business is a big commitment and takes up a lot of your time, but that doesn’t mean other priorities suddenly fall away. Nadia, owner of hair care brand, Nu Elefa Naturals, recognizes that juggling your business with other priorities is an ongoing challenge. For Nadia, this was ‘studying towards (her) degree and running a business at the same time’.
When faced with balancing your business with other priorities, Nadia recommends ‘creating a schedule by allocating specific hours to different responsibilities’, as well as ‘down time’ for much-needed rest.
3. Learning your specialty
When it comes to running your own business, the important thing to remember is that no one becomes an expert overnight. When you first start out, it’s impossible to know how to do and manage everything and as Lucy remembers, ‘there’s always something coming up that you don’t know the answer to’.
Lucy, owner of sustainable clothing company EYO Active, advises that this is ‘all part of the journey’ and ‘what challenges cannot be overcome’. She emphasized the importance of not getting too high on yourself and persevering.
4. Establish a supply chain
If your business involves transporting goods, dealing with logistics, transportation and establishing an effective supply chain can be a daunting prospect.
Natasha and Jack are the owners of Locks Drinks, a cocktail company that started on Locks. They told us that one of their biggest hurdles is ‘sourcing materials and establishing a strong supply chain’. Jack tells us how they overcame this challenge by focusing on ‘using as much local produce as possible and as many local suppliers as possible’ and their next step was to bring freight forwarding services into the mix.
There are expert shipping and logistics providers like Twill specifically designed to help small businesses grow. These logistics companies can provide trusted expertise and guidance to help SMEs establish an effective supply chain globally.
Don’t let challenges get you down, learn from them
All of our successful entrepreneurs acknowledge that it is inevitable to face setbacks in business, but emphasize the importance of adapting, overcoming and learning from these challenges.
Challenges can highlight areas of your business strategy and operations that may need some extra work, so it’s important to look at them as a learning curve that will help you become a more experienced entrepreneur.
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