It doesn’t matter what your focus or interests, every American dreams of turning their passions into their own business. However, it’s often that very romantic, pie in the sky mentality that leads to new entrepreneurs becoming stressed, burned out, and overwhelmed.
If you own a fledgling business or even if you’re thinking about starting one, here are a few tips and suggestions to help you overcome the real-world struggles and challenges that you’ll likely face as your new enterprise attempts to get off the ground and running.
Maintain Solid Financial Habits
The bedrock of a successful business is sound finances. While that doesn’t necessarily mean every entrepreneur is in a stellar financial state at all times if you want to overcome the challenges that you face as a business owner, part of the secret sauce comes from developing a savvy financial mindset.
This applies to every stage of the startup process. For instance, if you have a poor credit score, you may find that you can’t get funding without committing to a secure line of credit. However, this means you’ll have to use something like a car or your home as collateral, which is always risky business. In addition, it puts you in danger of being taken advantage of by predatory lenders. A knowledgeable entrepreneur would know enough to avoid this route unless absolutely necessary.
As your business grows, you’ll find that you need to continue to be equally skillful with financial considerations as you go along, such as how you purchase supplies, manage your debt, and forecast demand. If you strive to always be developing your financial knowledge, it can help you proactively avoid many of the expensive pitfalls that cause so many other entrepreneurs to stumble.
Care for Your Mind
Along with good financial acumen, it’s critical that you learn to understand your own mental health. Entrepreneurship may be exciting, high-energy, and ultimately rewarding. However, it’s also mentally exhausting.
Running your own business can lead to unpleasant interactions, late nights at work, restless sleep, and numerous other scenarios that are a drain on your brain. Over time this can open you up to the possibility of struggling with things like anxiety and depression.
While this is normal, it’s important that you strive to avoid living in an unhealthy mental state. In order to combat this tendency, take time to study cognitive distortions and learn coping mechanisms, like exercise and mindfulness, that can help you neutralize the effects of anxiety in your daily life.
Learn to Maintain Productivity
Productivity and efficiency are a business owner’s best friends. However, they require focus and energy to keep up. With that being the case, it’s important that, as a business owner, you find ways to maintain productivity even when you don’t feel “in the mood.”
After all, the success of your entire operation, especially at these early stages, is dependant on your efforts. Fortunately, there are many ways to tackle any productivity problems that may arise. For instance, you can:
- Lean on to-do lists (either on paper or in an app) to keep track of everything.
- Use tech to schedule events, stay organized, and generally streamline your activities.
- Learn to prioritize so that you can weed out the fluff and focus on what’s necessary.
Everyone’s particular productivity formula is different. However, if you take the time to invest in discovering your own productivity inclinations, you can use that knowledge to keep your efforts effective, even when you’re running low on energy or enthusiasm.
Maintain a Growth Minded Approach to Business
Finally, as you research your industry, hire employees, create and market your products, and so on, it’s essential that you maintain the right mindset.
There are two different mindsets that you can use as you attempt to use your skills and talents to build a business. A fixed mindset focuses on the idea that you were born with your current abilities and, while they can be mastered, they cannot be significantly changed. This kind of attitude often leads to underachieving and a general sense of atrophy.
The more healthy alternative is what is known as a growth mindset. This revolves around the belief that everyone is able to increase their inherent intelligence, talents, and abilities. In other words, if you adopt an attitude of continually learning, you can always find ways to improve and grow.
When you steer into a growth mindset for both you and your company culture, it provides a sense of indomitable courage. It turns struggles into learning opportunities, and it spurs you to be innovative as you search for solutions to your challenges.
Surviving and Thriving as a New Entrepreneur
Starting your own business is a worthy endeavor. Does it come with its challenges? Of course. Can these be overcome with courage, commitment, and fervor? Absolutely.
If you take the time to sharpen your skills, steel your will, and strengthen your mind beforehand, you’ll be able to take any challenges that arise head-on and not only survive but thrive in the process.
