Are You A Marketing Chief At A Startup: 5 Challenges You Should Be Ready To Face

Entrepreneurship is challenging, although when you run a company you end up realizing eventually that some of those challenges are actually pretty rewarding. Experienced business owners must learn to overcome all obstacles, regardless of their level of difficulty. One of your core duties will be working as hard as possible to exceed, or at the very least, match the competition; furthermore, you need to try to set up a trusted brand and adjust your strategies to match with the demands and expectations of your prospects and customers.
Young entrepreneurs who are new to the marketing industry, should know that there are several fundamental challenges that they might want to surpass. If this is your first rodeo in the marketing niche, you should be prepared to come across (at least once) the following 5 challenges.

1. Giving up any other career that you have

If you’re 100% sure that it’s time to start a business and dedicate all your time to nurturing and looking after that business, then you may have to give up your career. Entrepreneurship comes with lots of responsibilities, and it will be literally impossible for you to handle employees, and at the same time be an employee yourself someplace else.  Furthermore, since you’ll be handing your own business, you may be tempted to work day and night, even on the weekend. It’s ok to do this if you believe in the future of your company, although you might want to find a second income stream. Most businesses don’t make a profit until their second year of activity. Go with your gut and trust your instincts, although steer clear of taking unnecessary risks.

2. Financing

Every entrepreneur struggles when it comes to looking for a new way to fund their business. However, they do have several core benefits over newbies. For starters, since they’re experienced they may already have the capital to invest, or at the very least a revenue stream that they can use to fund their new business. Even if they failed in the past, they’ve likely managed to gather client connections of investment contacts to help them out with building their new startup. Newbies often start from scratch. They’ll be compelled to work like crazy in the beginning, and look for every way possible to get funding and get their startup off the ground.

3. Becoming a visionary

Every entrepreneur should have a vision. This means that you have to come up with your own ideas, and stick to your goals and principles. When a competitor makes an entrance, you will be the one to craft a plan of action, and settle on the best strategies to take them down. To succeed, you have to go beyond the normal, and set up solutions for each upcoming new issue. In case your team is stuck, it’s up to the entrepreneur to take a stand, brainstorm new ideas, and search for the best possible scenario to solve the unsolvable.
A key trait every entrepreneur should have: creative thinking. Now, you may not have a lot of time to develop brilliant ideas, but there’s no other way. If you don’t develop experience the hard way, you’ll start feeling pressured and it will be more difficult for you to settle on a plan and accept new ideas. Don’t be afraid to deal with the unknown. You can’t know for sure what will happen with your new startup. No matter how amazing your business plan and concepts are, you can never know when someone with better ideas and plans come to steal the show.

4. Making decisions

Making decisions is one of the toughest things an entrepreneur can do these days. New business owners are often forced to make tens of decisions per day, starting from the tinniest all the way to the most complex. Note that you’ll have to learn to make decisions that might affect the overall productivity of the company. Regardless, you’ll have to pull it off because there’s no one that will do it for you. In the world of marketing, being in charge can be incredibly nerve-wracking. That’s because you may be forced to work with tools you’ve never worked, or even tried before.
The key to success in entrepreneurship is to hire people that are smarter than you. Why? Because you have a lot to learn from them and from their experience, not just in terms of business. As an entrepreneur, your aim should be to expand your team and focus as much as possible on learning from the best. Be open to new scenarios, and don’t shy away from opportunities that don’t seem attractive in the first place.

5.  Failure

Whether you like it or not, in the world of business you can’t expect to succeed in proportion of 100%. It’s very important to be realistic, and have realistic goals. It’s ok to have faith and believe that your new startup is the best and most ingenious on the market, but you never know what might happen. What if an investor with millions of dollars in his pockets comes and steals your brilliant idea? What will you do then? Every entrepreneur should be prepared for failure. This doesn’t mean that you need to adopt a negative type of thinking. It won’t help you succeed, nor will it help strengthen your self-esteem. It just means that you must keep things real. Be realistic as this is all you need to achieve all the goals that you have planned.

Challenges are everywhere, not just in business. We face all sorts of challenges in our daily lives as well. But what we should do is transform every challenge into an opportunity. Whatever happens, just keep in mind that you have an opportunity to learn; even if we’re talking about mistakes. It’s ok to make mistakes, but try not to make the same mistakes two times as this won’t help you excel at entrepreneurship.

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Written by Steve Brown.