5 Tips to make your life as an entrepreneur easier

Entrepreneurship is not for the faint-hearted. It involves risks, often extreme hard work and possibly years before real success is found. Yet, in the US alone, each year over 70,000 startups are founded. And this is because it can bring big wins and a chance to live life on your own terms.

Here we support your journey through entrepreneurship by offering tips on how to make running your business easier. We also touch upon how to overcome difficulties that arise.

5 tips to make running a business easier

Any self-made business is as good as the entrepreneur that runs it. The qualities of the founder will reflect how the products and services turn out, how customers are treated and how processes flow. So first and foremost an entrepreneur has to develop the characteristics that align with a high likelihood of success. Some qualities that can make you a better entrepreneur are:

1. Discipline: Boring as this sounds, it is the most crucial quality. Showing up every single day creates consistency and ultimately the rolling drive in a business. The reverse can be costly to growth! It is also important be precise and disciplined when marketing your business as you need to ensure that you have the right audience and have attracted your ideal customer.
2. Research and Planning: As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there! The point here is, researching your market well and planning ahead makes your goal clear. Making sure you invest in the correct marketing scheme, on the correct platforms is important and can be a costly mistake if you make the wrong decision.

From there, you can decide on the next steps strategically.

1. Adaptability: Despite our best-laid plans, however, sometimes things change. There might be new regulations to our industry, or a natural event can put brakes on it. An adaptable entrepreneur can pivot at such times and make the best of the situation, nevertheless. This counts for both business growth and the attraction of employees for your small business. It is becoming a known fact that business owners need to adapt for the new generation of workers. Gen Z are pricing that the salary isn’t the most important factor in a job, it will be down to the workplace and the value and respect they receive.
2. Enthusiasm: Enthusiasm is infectious. If you convey your vision with enthusiasm, you are more likely to bind others, including customers, to your purpose. This can get you closer to your goal. This will start at the managers, work through the employees and to the customer. A happy employee, especially in sales, is estimated to increase sales by 20% therefore proving it is an important asset.
3. Create ease of doing business: From happy customers to vendors who want to work with you, good relationship building skills cannot be emphasised enough. Business is built on working with others. And if others love what an entrepreneur does, they are more likely to engage with them. There are many ways of wowing our partners, including simple ones like ensuring that our documents are easy to access and read. While MS Word and Mac Pages make fine documents, their integrity can be lost over different devices and operating systems. Using editable PDFs instead, where changes can be made conveniently while preserving the document format can be ideal. And it does not take much effort to do this either.

Challenges for entrepreneurs

Ultimately though, the effectiveness of an entrepreneur lies in how they meet challenges. All business will meet some or the other difficulties, big and small. Small ones can range from technology glitches to short-term cash flow challenges. Big ones can be your products going obsolete if a new one shows up. Or the arrival of a big competitor in the industry, which puts a self-run business at risk.

If you are a young Entrepreneur, you may already work this way, however the new workforce known as Gen Z are proving that happiness and value within a workplace is the most important factor within any job. It is important, especially if you are an older entrepreneur that this new generation of workers will present challenges no other generation have produced. With flexible working and remote working now, people are valuing their work-life balance more and therefore this is something you may need to adapt into your business. As an entrepreneur you will need to attract this generation and therefore introducing entry-level, internships and apprenticeships maybe the way to go. As challenging as this may be, it is a hurdle every business at some point will soon have to face and it will be beneficial.

Success stories

Luckily, there are plenty of success stories to constantly inspire entrepreneurs who might be going through challenges. Like Adi Dassler of Adidas fame. His success began only at age 49 when he registered the signature three-striped shoe we all know today. He started making shoes in his mother’s washroom in small-town Germany. And touched a huge success point when Germany won the World Cup in 1954 wearing Adidas shoes.

In more recent times, dating app Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe hit almost instant success. Her dating app, where women take the lead, reached 100,000 downloads in a month of being launched. She entered a market niche with no precedent and saw a need no one else did. When women are taking initiative everywhere else in their life, dating methods are glaringly outdated.

Another prime example of a successful entrepreneur is Ben Francis. This may not be a name known to many but the brand he created from the garage of his parent’s home is. Gymshark has become a business valued at $1.45 billion in 2020. Francis is known as one of the youngest billionaires in the world and the newest and youngest billionaire in Britain.

Decide to win

Finding encouragement from success stories can make an entrepreneur’s life much easier. Even during hard times. If they are able to add qualities like discipline, market research and planning and enthusiasm, they can be unstoppable. All that is required then is the decision to win.