A business is like a child to their passionate business owners. However, many times, they find themselves at perils and end up dragging their business down.
Can you not seem to find a reason for it? Let’s have a look at some of the phenomena, which causes such businesses to go down and how identifying them and applying some remedies can ensure their survival.
1. Stay Away from Negative Publicity!
No matter how much you have been inspired by the movie, “Wolf of the Wall Street” and its important lesson “Bad Publicity is still Publicity!”. This does not work in reality. A business needs its reputation to survive and an Incheon of negative publicity can easily make things go wrong.
With the amazing advent of technology, the world has been connected more and if one person ruins the good reputation of your business, the same can reach every single associate of your business and the hard work and all your efforts will eventually die.
According to a study, close to 90% of customers buy a product or service from any business after reading reviews online. Hence, the company’s reputation online and offline can make a lot of difference in its survival.
So, hire a good Public Relations Team, and build a strong reputation with good after-sales service. You can also run strong marketing campaigns and innovative customer referral programs to further up your industry reputation.
2. Debt can kill Your Business
The vicious circle of debt does not keep any business alive. Debt is one of the most powerful motivators to ensure the fact that your business will die a painful death. According to attorneydebtfighters.com, debt can happen due to a lot of reasons like improper sales research, increase in costs, ill-use of loans, faulty management, etc.
A study showed that close to 82% of businesses face cash flow problems and they leverage their business to such an extent that they lose the business. So, keep your debts to the bare minimum and your cash flow stable if you really want to win the finance game.
Many times, the creditors of the business also hire debt collection agencies to realize their debts. The debt collectors are usually very cunning and may use any tricks up their sleeves to ruin your reputation and get everything they want.
Debt Collection in Atlanta can be ruthless and innovative, too as there are a lot of world-class firms like Kaplan Group, Cedar Financial, DeWoskin Law Firm, etc., which help ease the process.
3. The Supply Chain is very sloppy.
The supply chain is one of the most important organs of the business. Imagine the human body, the Supply Chain is like the conglomerate of nerves and blood vessels, which is important for keeping every part and organ of the human body alive.
Similarly, Supply Chain connects the resources from one end of the business to the other and provides the business an opportunity to excel. Hence, if your business does not have a strong supply chain, it is bound to die. So, what’s the way out?
You should always have concrete optional avenues to replace certain components of your existing supply chain and you should also fairly compensate the current supply chain participants as they have the ability to cripple your business, single-handedly.
4. Employee Retention is not that great.
One of the major troubles, which any business can face is the ability to retain employees. Well, employees are always considered the lifeline of the business. Also, have you ever wondered what will happen if you walk into your offices and find it empty?
Not only will your work be delayed or be incomplete, but it will also lead you to a lot of repercussions starting from expectations and deadlines not being met, the end customers facing problems, the business not functioning properly and if these employees are not replaced immediately, then death.
According to a survey, small businesses employ close to 59 million workers in the USA. Hence, there’s a mentality of people to switch if they are not fairly remunerated. The best approach for this has to be a strong Human Resources team followed by employees’ activities and making them feel wanted in the organization.
5. There is a Lack of Business Plan.
A strong and executable business plan is just as important as a visionary entrepreneur! If the vision is strong, and the mission is clear, the execution will follow smoothly.
Have you ever wondered why only a few businesses make it to the top? It is because every business owner starts with a passion and a zeal to do justice to the business. However, over time, this zeal does not materialize into a workable and scalable business model. And, that is where things start to go wrong.
So, what’s the key takeaway from this? You should have a strong vision, which can be broken into several milestones, and the same has to be properly charted as well over the fiscal years with a provision to make changes as and when troubles knock your door.
6. There is a lot of competition.
For any business, before they go deep into the ocean waters, it is important that they do a SWOT Analysis. Well, if the SWOT is not properly done, you will never be able to reckon your real competitors in the industry. How many business owners have you seen complaining about the competition?
I am sure the list goes on and on, and this usually happens because they have not differentiated their product. Although there is a Pizza Hut and a Domino’s, and both of them sell Pizza, only. Still, at a global level, their product is hugely differentiated.
One deals in the in-house restaurant experience while the other capitalizes on the home delivery model, and has made a reputation for itself. Thus, both are flourishing in their own way and if they would not have done that, one of them would have surely died.
Over to you…
Even though there can be other reasons why your business can be dragged down like improper market research, huge competition, lesser amount of sales, etc., these are some of the major tombstones which if avoided or rectified, can keep the business going. So, go get going!
