The truth is 50% of small businesses do not live to celebrate their fifth birthday. Many fall out due to poor marketing strategies, unclear vision and mission, inadequate management team, and lack of funding.

The situation is now worse with the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic that demands enormous things on this sector. The many changes in the last year, such as requiring large working spaces, shifting to working from home, keeping up with a volatile market, and reduced funding, have seen many startups lose the battle.

It’s not yet clear when things will finally return to normality, but you can propel your business to prosperity with these five strategies.

Automate Your Business Processes

Any business that wishes to cross the fifth-year mark should make plans to cut down on its expenditure. One of the ways to do this is to automate your business processes. Technology reduces time wastage and ensures more work gets done with less input. For instance, a single employee can easily carry out tasks in a few hours that would otherwise need five workers and several days to complete.

Moreover, it helps keep accounting errors such as overpricing and overpayment of workers familiar in small ventures in check. Concurrently adoption and technology usage in your small business benefits in carrying out essential tasks such as claims processing, advertising, stock taking, communication, and securing your business operations.

Manage Your Finances

Lack of finances is a significant cause of small businesses’ failure. The first five years of life are critical for every business as it is their time of growth and exploration. These processes require extensive funding, which many business owners do not know how to source and manage.

Although many lenders are offering financial support to startups, their interest rates are usually unfavorable, and opting for them may lead to immediate failure of your venture. For this reason, you should always consider hiring a financial advisor to guide you on the best route to take.

Equally important, ensure to invest in accounting software such as QuickBooks to help you track your business finances.

Invest in Your Internal Team

Your employees are critical to your business’s success. Besides getting the job done, having the right employees increases your brand awareness and ensures you have a positive relationship with the customers. In a nutshell, your employees hold the key to your business survival in the first five years.  

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Following this, you must start right by hiring the correct workers to work for you. Although a tedious and time-consuming process getting things right from the onset will save you the headache that comes later, such as employee turnover and poor performance.

The next task after getting the right personnel is to invest in their skill development. Empowering your internal team through training, mentoring, group discussions, and task delegation will open their mind and enable them to provide better services to the customers.

Moreover, such employees are likely to remain loyal to you as they know you have their best interest at heart.

Expand Your Customer Base

The truth is more businesses are spurning up daily today than ever before. What’s more, these businesses are providing better services at a reduced price. The repercussion of this is increased competition where you cannot be sure of a repeat customer after a single purchase.

To survive in such a market, you must play up your game in your customer satisfaction efforts and invest in continuous marketing. Some practical ways to do this include offering the best customer service, satisfying your buyer’s needs through giving them the best products in the market, and offering incentives.

There is a high chance of a satisfied customer coming back and referring their friends to purchase from you. Moreover, their reviews will come in handy in your brand awareness creation campaign. Another effective way of expanding your customer base is to stand out from the rest by creating a solid social media appearance and an easy-to-navigate website that tells what you do.

Finally, don’t forget to get endorsements from well-known and trusted brands and participate in corporate social responsibility activities.

Be Adaptable To Change

Being static is a significant mistake leading to the failure of many small businesses today. It’s common to find business owners investing in an idea that’s no longer working. This is wrong and will only add to your frustrations.

To make it in the business world today, you must be adaptable to change. This requires that you invest in continuous research to identify what’s selling in the market and tailor your efforts towards it.

The Final Word

The truth is there is so much growth opportunity in the small business sector today. Nonetheless, hacking it here requires hard work and determination. Use the above five key strategies to take your small venture to the next level.

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