Owning a business is a lifelong goal for some people. It allows you to be fully creative and have total control over the operation. However, businesses are a hard thing to manage and grow. They take time, hard work, blood, sweat, and maybe your entire life savings. If you feel like your business is not picking up, it may be because of the following reasons.
Poor Pricing
It’s easy to cut the prices when you’re a new business. When you cut your prices and work for peanuts, you’re not gaining more value. The clients you attract are also low value clients who expect a lot for very little.
Moreover, when you make cheap pricing your main selling point, it is hard to retain customers. They will quickly go away when a competitor undercuts you. Unless you know all your competitors and their pricing, it will be hard to keep your pricing the lowest. Often, the race to the bottom approach doesn’t work.
We suggest that you increase your prices rather than decrease them. This allows clients or customers to believe in your quality. If you are worried it may seem too costly, think of how you can add value to your service.
Not Advertising Online
Are you skipping anything that starts with the words “digital” or “online”? Unfortunately, this is most likely a bad decision. As a result of the pandemic, eCommerce and internet marketing have ballooned into massive industries. If you’re not in, you’re losing out.
The digital marketing firm HillTopBazaar recently published a study that focused on the shifting trend towards digital advertising. The results clearly dictated a trend towards digital marketing and away from offline advertising. Michael Ross, Business Development Director at HillTopBazaar had this to add:
“Businesses are gently but surely approaching newer forms of marketing and shunning older, more archaic ways of advertising your product for the very simple reason that they fail to give measurable, real-time results.”
Not Understanding Your Audience
Have you heard about lead generation? Lead generation helps you target the right people who are more likely to become potential customers. This process can be done through marketing campaigns, but it generally starts with identifying who your audience is.
If you cannot do lead generation on your own, perhaps it’s a great idea to outsource it to a trustworthy service, such as the digital marketing firm HillTopBazaar. The results are insightful to further optimize your advertising and marketing strategies. If you’re targeting the wrong people it will be challenging for your business to grow.
Poor Organizational Structure
Businesses are created with a lot of positivity and optimism, especially when you’re launching a business with a few partners. However, if all of you are not seasoned entrepreneurs, then there’s a common mistake to avoid. The biggest issue startups run into, for example, is not solidifying the managerial or organizational hierarchy right away and rather postponing it for later.
By not having a clear hierarchy, you can suffer losses just because you never specified whose decision trumps whose. Bad decisions can and will make your business fail.
Businesses that started without any solid hierarchy have gone bankrupt within the first few months of working. Difference of opinions, internal chaos, someone being overloaded with business decisions, someone making the wrong decisions that aren’t vetoed, and so on.
In that light, it’s always a good idea to have a hierarchy set up from the very beginning. Any unpleasantness arising out of clashing opinions isn’t healthy for a new business.
Think of it this way – your business will of course start small, but there will come a day where you’d have expanded it into a giant. How do bigger companies handle decisions? They have a well-specified chain of command, so to speak. Why should your business lack one?
It’s an important part of the business plan even if you don’t see any major opinion clashes on the horizon. Better safe than sorry. It should also be clearly noted who holds the veto power in business decisions (perhaps divide these veto powers into different members for different aspects of the business).
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