3 Business Tips for Millennial Entrepreneurs

A quick search for practical advice to grow a business by globally recognized and visionary business leaders revealed a common theme – “founding and growing a business isn’t an easy task”.

Unfazed by this hard fact, millennials are constantly gaining more admiration for their love for entrepreneurship and it is not surprising that young entrepreneurs are among the most driven and visionary business leaders today.

It’s not all rosy though. As a young entrepreneur focused on scaling your business, you constantly have to deal with making infinite number of decisions simultaneously about raising fund, choosing the right business tools, successfully managing your team, growing your revenue, reducing churn, competing effectively against established companies and a whole lot more complexities of starting and running your business.

Energetic and goal-driven, you often put on as many hats as possible to get your business off the ground onto a growth trajectory. This puts you under immense pressure and even worse is you have to always confront the imposter syndrome. You know, that little voice at the back of your mind that tells you, that you’re not good enough, despite any clear successes you’ve recorded.

While you cannot exactly remove pressures from the job of being an entrepreneur, you can effectively manage the complexities associated with starting and running a business as a young business owner.

To help you get started, here are 3 practical tips to sustain growth in your business as a millennial entrepreneur.

Outsource

Companies usually outsource to cut costs. However, it is not only about cost savings, you can outsource extra task to achieve increased productivity, access skilled expertise, and relieve some of the pressures of running your business.

To get the best results when outsourcing, you need to first understand the pros and cons of outsourcing and then figure out the right task to outsource. A general guideline suggest that you outsource repetitive task such as data entry, specialized task such as IT support or expert task such as financial analysis.

As a young entrepreneur, you want to focus your energy on top-level business activities that are critical to growing your business, hence it is important to ensure that you are not outsourcing a task that is the centre of your company’s value proposition. As a rule of thumb, do not outsourcing any business function that will directly impact your customers and revenue.

Tap into a community of Founders

Being a young entrepreneur is tough and at those dark moments when the insecurities of your expectations versus the reality of how well your business is performing begins to bite, your next move could make or mar the future of your business.

You need to be able to draw on support from people who can empathize with you and offer practical business advice to help you forge ahead. The biggest help you can get is from a strong community of other founders and young entrepreneurs who can relate with the many challenges of running and growing a business.

You need to make a very conscious effort to build a trusted network and support system of like minds. Make it a priority to attend relevant industry event, join entrepreneurial forums and use LinkedIn to build a strong network.

Stay Close to your Customers

The faster your company grows, the easier it becomes to get caught up in “running the business”. Typically, you could get more engrossed in solving peculiar problem with building a company such as building culture, managing your teams, hiring people, resolving disputes, etc.

What this means is that you do not get to interact directly with your customers as often as you did when you just started the business.

Do not slip out of having regular interactions with your customers. If you do, you risk falling behind your competitors and no matter how quickly you can innovate, you may not be able to catch up.

Spend quality time reaching out to your customers periodically to feel the pulse of how well product/service meets their needs and identify ways to make it better. You’ll be amazed at how rewarding this exercise can be.

Source: smallbusinesscan.com