5 Keys To Business Growth Learned From Founding Successful Startups

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Becoming an entrepreneur can be exciting, especially when you can successfully bring your product or service concept from a vision on paper to a thriving business model. Still, getting to this stage will no doubt be filled with challenges or uncertainties as you navigate the unpredictable industry terrain.

Unfortunately, these roadblocks can often become overwhelming for business owners to manage, especially when they don’t have large teams or unlimited resources at their disposal. However, there are some key business strategies that you can apply that have been learned by various successful startup organizations.

The Most Common Challenges Most New Businesses Face

While all businesses have their own set of challenges to deal with, new business ventures often face a much more uphill battle before they can start to see a certain level of success. Some of these challenges can even have serious implications for a business’s growth and survival if they’re not dealt with the right way.

These common challenges can include:

• Lack of Funding – Securing enough funding for the business’s product development and operational functions is critical. Startup businesses often work with limited resources, which can lead to major cash flow issues if left unadjusted.
• Fierce Competition – When new businesses enter the market, they often face well-established players with much larger marketing budgets and established reputations. This can make it difficult for startups to differentiate themselves enough to become successful.
• Difficulties Building the Right Team – Attracting and retaining quality talent is another struggle many new businesses have. Because they have built up enough credibility on hiring platforms or job review sites, they often need to prove themselves more thoroughly to attract potential employee candidates.
• Marketing Roadblocks – Balancing marketing budgets to reach the right audience of potential customers isn’t always easy for startup companies. They often need to choose only specific platforms or formats to focus their sales initiatives out of the gate. It can also take time for new businesses to determine what marketing strategies work best for them, leading to high-cost experimentation that can significantly impact profitability.

5 Key Strategies for Growing Your Business

By applying certain strategies, all businesses, including startup ventures, can put themselves on a path to success. Below are five key strategies you’ll want to prioritize:

Obsessive Customer Focus

It doesn’t matter what current stage of development your business is in – your customers are the lifeblood of your organization. Because of this, keeping them at the forefront of all decisions you make while creating products or services that directly address their needs in the market is vital.

To get to this point, conducting target market research can help to gauge what types of problems your customers need solutions for. Another way to maintain a borderline obsessive customer focus is to regularly ask them directly. This can be done by creating campaigns with engaging surveys or asking certain customers if you can interview them directly about their recent experiences with your brand or the things they’re hoping you offer.

Building a Resilient, Adaptable Team

One common trait of all successful brands is a highly motivated and passionate team of individuals working for them. As a startup business, one of your priorities should be creating an effective strategy for recruiting individuals who align with your company culture and are eager to continuously grow in a dynamic organization.

But before you start putting together your first job description, you’ll want to avoid the bad habit of making your listings unapproachable. Instead of primarily focusing on specific technical skills needed or industry qualifications, you want to look for individuals who are adaptable to change and who are open to growing with the organization.

Use Data to Drive Your Decision-Making

Your startup business will need to make no shortage of decisions as you begin to scale. It’s important to avoid the tendency of overly relying on “gut feel” when making choices for your organization. While many entrepreneurs may have a lot of industry experience and feel capable of making smart business decisions, it’s important to back up gut feelings with reliable data.

In order to feed your decisions with data insights, it’s important to first establish relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) associated with your business goals. This could include benchmarking customer acquisition costs, advertising conversion rates, website traffic, and other quantifiable metrics that can provide you with the information you need to validate your decisions on increased/decreased spend or when exploring new market opportunities.

Embrace Calculated Risk-Taking

Although data insights and adhering to strict budgets are important, various opportunities may arise that could be slightly risky for the business to explore. However, some of these risks can pay off considerably and shouldn’t necessarily be completely ignored when they arise.

Embracing a calculated risk-taking culture is important not only for entrepreneurs, but the employees that work in the organization. By being okay with challenging the status quo once in a while, trying new ideas, and looking for alternative avenues to explore, organizations are able to be much more innovative while standing out more from competitors.

Learn How to Be Resourceful

All startups need to learn how to become resourceful as they start to grow. However, this doesn’t mean businesses should lose sight of maximizing the value of their time and resources as they grow.

Being resourceful as a business means looking for unconventional ways to improve spending and bring more value to initiatives. One way to do this is to leverage existing networks and vendor relationships for support and access to important data or industry resources.

Organizations can also make smarter decisions about the type of software and solutions they invest in. Using open-source software is a great way to do this since it makes it much easier to integrate multiple solutions into one platform, significantly reducing the time and energy it takes to manage disparate business tools.

Help to Grow Your Startup Business

Although growing a business can be challenging, there are some effective strategies you can follow. By following the practical advice discussed, you can maximize your organization’s success while creating a more sustainable foundation to grow your business.