by Spectrum Business
Small businesses form the essential core of the American economy, employing millions of Americans across the country and contributing more than half the value of the U.S. GNP each year. Unlike their competitors at the multinational corporate level, small businesses face unique challenges that can impede success and threaten the survival of many companies each year.
The challenges for small business are specific to their size, resources and capabilities, but that doesn't make them impossible to overcome. In this piece you'll discover three key challenges that small businesses face and advice on how to overcome these obstacles.
As a large corporation grows, its greater access to capital resources and higher profit levels can help accelerate that growth. For a small business to grow, owners and managers will need to hire people who are the right fit for their staffing puzzle. The wrong hires in a small business can have greater ramifications because of the small size of the company compared to one wrong hire in a company employing thousands of individuals.
Another problem small businesses need to address is properly scaling the business as it grows. It’s important for small business owners to have an accurate and detailed plan for growth. This plan should start with a short-term (6 to 12 months) vision and a long-term (3 to 5 years) strategic vision with specific goals for company growth.
When small businesses are selective in the hiring process, picking only top-tier talent, they'll have the right talent in place to meet the strategic goals they've set for growth.
Since most small businesses operate on a regional or local basis, they have a much smaller customer base to work with. This can make it challenging for small businesses to remain competitive with other players in the industry. In order to overcome this obstacle, small businesses need to excel in developing a customer-focused marketing program.
There are a variety of marketing services available today, namely email and content marketing, that are designed to help businesses maintain solid relationships with clients in their target market. Meeting the needs of customers is not enough though — small businesses should aim to exceed customers’ expectations in order to keep them loyal to their brand.
Money is important to all companies, so saying that it is more important to small businesses is a bit of an overstatement. With that said, managing finances is more important in a small business because many small businesses operate on a shoestring budget with no room for errors. A lot of small business owners and managers manage the company's finances with a manual spreadsheet in the early days of the company.
Over time though, it can become far too difficult to continue using a manual spreadsheet to track the finances of a growing company. Ideally, the amount of money coming and going from the company becomes too large and the client base too extensive to continue using inefficient manual spreadsheets.
However, solving the problem doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to evolve as the company grows. Numerous cloud-based services are available that provide small businesses with a virtual accountant. This provides small business owners with the ability to manage and track money, create invoices, analyze expenses and create expense reports easily without having to hire more personnel or remove themselves from day-to-day operations just to manage the money.
Small businesses face challenges every day that larger corporations don't have to worry about, but those challenges don’t need to slow down company growth or impact the future of the business.
