Business people face many more barriers today around the world than before. So one of the most important questions for business owners is how to overcome the barriers they face in the first years of the business. The good thing is that today there is a lot of information available on tackling these barriers as more and more business people are opening up about their experiences. Here is what some business people have to say about the biggest barrier they faced when they started their businesses and what the challenge was in overcoming it.
The question we asked them was: What has been the biggest challenge you faced in the first years of building your business and what made overcoming it so difficult?
Here’s what they had to say
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David Scott
Title: CEO
Company: Neutypechic
Linkedin: N/A
The biggest challenge we faced in the first years of building our business was finding and keeping good employees. We were a small company with big ambitions, and it was difficult to find people who shared our passion and commitment. We went through several rounds of layoffs, and it was tough on the team morale. We found a great team of people who believed in our vision and were willing to work hard to make it a reality. We’re now a much stronger company because of them.
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Michelle Humphrey
Title: Founder and CEO
Company: Resignation Letter Samples
Linkedin: https://resignationlettersamples.com/
The biggest challenge I faced in the first year of business was figuring out how to stand out in a crowded market. I was selling a product that was very similar to what other businesses were offering, and I knew that I needed to find a way to make my company stand out. After some trial and error, I realized that the key was to focus on providing outstanding customer service. I made sure that every interaction my customers had with my business was positive and that their needs were always put first. As a result, my business began to grow, and I was able to attract more customers. The first year of business can be tough, but by focusing on providing value to your customers, you can overcome any challenge.
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Lane Rizzardini
Title: Co-Owner
Company: Marion Relationship Marketing
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lanerizzardini/
The biggest challenge our business has faced in it’s early years is developing a cold sales program. To date we’ve been lucky enough to be entirely referral based, which has allowed us to focus entirely on serving clients and building our team and operations.
But referrals can be slow and inconsistent, and if you really want to not just survive but thrive, you need to be doing your own outbound marketing and sales.
This has been a challenge for us because my partner and I are not and have never been sales people. Not only were we not trained on it, it just doesn’t come naturally to either of us. So we invested in a full time salesperson to spearhead that work.
We also were struggling with bandwidth. With a small team myself and my partner are still pretty involved day to day in the marketing of our clients, so carving out time for our own marketing can be challenging. We got serious about hiring and finding the help we needed to be able to delegate day to day work so we could focus on developing marketing assets and sales processes for our business.
Through hard work we’re overcoming these obstacles successfully, and work to help our clients overcome these obstacles to success as well.
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Adit Jain
Title: Co-Founder, CEO
Company: Leena AI
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adit-jain-leena-ai/
Since our inception, there have been a number of challenges we’ve had to overcome. First came the pre-Product Market Fit (pre-PMF), where we were contemplating what to do, and how to provide a solution to people’s problems. The second part of it was the post-Product Market Fit (post-PMF) – here we had started seeing some traction, a few customers were coming in, and we realized that the company was scalable. Each phrase came with a different set of challenges.
In the first phase, the main challenge was survival. We had little knowledge about what to solve and who to solve for, and we just had to stay afloat and gain enough customers who believed in us to prove ourselves. There were a lot of hustles that kept us alive during the first phase. However, even in the pre-PMF stage, one can raise seed funding, whereas this was non-existent when we started just a few years back.
Post-PMF, the struggle was getting the right platform to boost trust in our customers and connect with the right people to help us with our growth. This was phase two of the challenges we faced. That’s where Y-Combinator, our initial seed investor, supported us. Alongside that, our biggest challenge was also to find the right talents to join us because, as early team members, they ensure the company’s success in the long run – and we had to have strong pillars to make our house stand.
During stage three, we were established, had hired our initial team, and set up a customer base – now came the time for rapid expansion of the company. Our next target was to make the company global, and that’s where our Series A and B came into the picture from Greycroft and Bessemer Venture Partners. The challenges in this stage have been off the scale. We were a small team working in the company, and new challenges came in every day. Now it was about transforming the company from a people-dependent organization to a process-dependent organization. That said, you always need great people, and finding great people will continue to remain a challenge, irrespective of the size of your organization. Today, we are finally in a position to make growth process-dependent instead of people-dependent.
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Edward Wright
Title: CEO and Founder
Company: Cereal Secrets
Linkedin: https://cerealsecrets.com/
Confronting the Criticism
Negative people are far more prevalent when it comes to running your own company for some reason. I was lectured on multiple occasions about the countless ways in which my firm can fail. The notion that it is safer to rely on precarious employment at a brick-and-mortar establishment than it is to be the CEO of your own firm is held by a significant number of people.
Sometimes criticisms become personal. They will attempt to highlight whatever bad aspect of you that they can discover, projecting their own anxieties onto you in the process, since they will feel threatened and envious of your independence.
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Susan Melony
Title: Founder
Company: Cool Stuff
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susan-melony/
One of the hardest challenges that we faced stemmed largely from a lack of knowledge and experience with respect to the intricacies of a budding business venture. These branched out to issues ranging from creating a presence online with our potential customers and getting word of our business out there, pricing policies etc that required extensive market research, to coming up with solutions for technical and legal issues. We knew that these were certain aspects of a start-up which could only be solved with advice from experts, but also treading that path ourselves, and forming viable solutions based on our firms’ subjective experience. The part that made it increasingly difficult was to endure certain trials and errors with patience, while picking up on key learnings as we went along. Integrating these learnings along the way helped pave the path towards growth and sustainable establishment.
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Akanke Adefunmi
Title: Business leadership coach and the founder of Claim Your Shero
Company: Claim Your Shero
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akankeadefunmi/
The biggest challenge for me in the first years of building your business was that I was going through a divorce at the same time I was building my business. Having been a homemaker my kid’s entire lives, I didn’t want them to have to navigate a new life while simultaneously having their mom working for an employer and be unavailable until evenings. So I made the decision to build a business that allowed me to work from home.
It was a rollercoaster ride for a very long time. On one hand, I was excited and determined to create a business that would sustain my kids and me, while on the other hand I was resentful, in deep grief, and scared as hell about our future.
Without realizing it, I was building a business on a foundation of fear, anger, and sadness. Which had me making a lot of mistakes along the way––bad decisions, financial risks that lead to big losses, and trusting a lot of business “experts” whom I had no business trusting. What I know to be true is that when you’re building something on a bedrock of fear, anger, and sadness it’s not gonna turn out well, or at the very least, it’s going to be very difficult to create from and move forward.
Thankfully one fateful day I bumped into a former classmate from a business incubator program we’d both participated in. We chatted briefly and it turned out that she’d been successfully running her coaching business while I was still struggling day after day. That fateful meeting changed something for me. I stopped chasing those shiny new sales and marketing tactics that made big promises. Instead, I decided to focus on investigating and mastering the areas of myself that kept me stuck, playing small, hitting ceilings, and engaging in self-sabotaging behavior.
If I knew then what I know now about the importance of investing in both business growth strategy as well as CEO development strategy––the growth of the woman running the darn show, then the first years of building my business would have been more smooth, clear, financially rewarding, and fun.
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Josh Wright
Title: CEO of CellPhoneDeal
Company: CellPhoneDeal
Linkedin: linkedin.com/josh-wright
One of the biggest challenges that we faced in the first years of building our business was building brand awareness. This was due to a number of things. Firstly, we didn’t have a very big budget, which meant we struggled to produce marketing campaigns that would make our audience actually appreciate what we were trying to do. Secondly, we didn’t have enough knowledge about who our audience was. We thought that everyone would want a phone at a better price if they could get it, and that mistake led to a number of marketing campaigns that simply didn’t hit their target. Lastly, we saw SEO as a once off thing that we could complete and not go back to. This was also a big mistake because audience needs and behaviors change, meaning your SEO needs to change to meet those needs and behaviors.
We made a lot of mistakes in the beginning stages of our business, but they were excellent learning curves which have set us up for success now. We’ve learnt to analyze every aspect of the business and thereby make positive changes quickly in order to appeal to our audience and continue to remain relevant in a number of different ways.
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Laura Fuentes
Title: Operator of Infinity Dish
Company: Infinity Dish
Linkedin: .
It’s always hard starting from square one as a business. In addition to hiring staff, figuring out work-flow, earning customer’s trust, you have to start and maintain relationships. From vendors to IT specialists to advertising gurus, it’s of the utmost importance to start building relationships as soon as possible once you start your business. That’s what makes the first few years of starting a business so hard: even if you come in with some existing relationships, you have to prove to them that your new business is worth their time and effort. Additionally you’ll need to expand and improve your network as your business gets off the ground and your needs grow and change.
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Ksana Liapkova
Title: Head of Admitad ConvertSocial
Company: Admitad ConvertSocial
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksana-liapkova-73a651119/
One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced was segmentation of customers. Since our clients are bloggers, we used to segment them by social media channels and platforms, which helped us to focus separately on each: YouTube, Instagram, etc. However, we’ve been growing fast and realized that we need a different segmentation for our customers – by geo/niche. The hardest part, which we had to overcome, was to change the work of the business structures as well, since their responsibilities and goals didn’t respond to the new segmentation. We had to change each employee’s focus completely.
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Yvette Estime
Title: Co-owner
Company: Dirty Celebrity
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin/in/yvetteestime
No doubt there is always 2 issues a new business has to deal with when starting out and that is cash flow and marketing.
Alot of times, you will need to add the feul to the car before it starts so to speak. You will always be your business’ first investor.
When we started out that first year, we had to decide how we were going to create ground income. We did not have any collateral so basically we had to get creative. We mostly did custom work so we get paid for materials upfront before the work was finished.
Building trust and a name were the only way to reach this type of consumer so without a marketing budget, we had to network alot. As an introvert, I must say I struggled with this aspect.
As a made to order company, we decided to offer services to create a product rather than hold inventory which we can afford to do now.
We were able to solve our cash flow problem with this service.
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Hannah Dworkin
Title: Leader and Recruiter
Company: USScrapyard
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-dworkin-93b63b237
Many business owners can count “starting a business” among their most notable accomplishments; however, the greater obstacle is “keeping a business going.” There are numerous obstacles that are universal to the world of business, regardless of the size of the company. The process of bringing my business concept to the market was difficult for me. There are a lot of people who are thinking about new made products on the market and following the concepts of brands that they like. It is generally more tricky to make anything new, so raising awareness that used products are also valuable and beneficial is rather necessary. So I confronted it. I had to come to terms with the fact that people also value the scrap of vehicles as a commodity to sell. It was challenging to get individuals to participate in this campaign. It seemed to raise people’s awareness about the importance of collecting scraps. The concept has been around for a while, but the creation of a platform designed only for scrap metal was new and presented a number of difficulties in its creation and distribution. I had to go electronically and physically door to door to spread this business idea among common people.
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Dan Earles
Title: Founder/Principal
Company: eaa
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-earles-aia-leed-ap-id-c-09289531/
I believe the biggest challenge when beginning my business was to build a steady client base that was one of clients you want to work with and are good to work with. In the early stages of starting a business, I feel you are willing to take on whatever you can get and sometimes it is not necessarily the best for you. It is hard to say no to work when you are starting up, but over time you learn that sometimes it is better to say NO.
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Sara Graves
Title: CEO
Company: USTitleLoans
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-graves-06147b236/
Labor quality was the biggest challenge I faced in the first years of building my business. This limitation was tough as most business challenges can’t be overcome without a great team that understands the business. Overcoming this challenge was difficult as the cost of onboarding an employee was troubling as I operated with a smaller budget. Also, I hired with a short-term mindset by sending out a job description, screening applicants, and deciding without regarding the high costs of hiring. Regardless, to solve this, I invested a significant amount of time in the hiring process to find great employees, even if it took longer. I believed the great employees would take my company to the next level. Additionally, I focused on the company’s and employer brand to help potential candidates feel excited about the possibility of working for my company as well as attracting top talent.
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Juan Dominguez
Title: CEO
Company: The Dominguez Firm
Linkedin: https://dominguezfirm.com
Every business goes through a period where the team has to start looking for clients because they do not have customers to vouch for them yet. For my law firm, that has been the biggest challenge. In this very connected world, word-of-mouth is what dictates whether the business will thrive or not. Securing the first few clients, doing an excellent job for them, and making sure they let other people know about our service were our initial investment. I knew that this is how foundations are built, and so I created a strong foundation as much as possible. Now after 30 years, I am proud that the team took the time to build trust among my clients because our biggest challenge led us to create the most remarkable service in the industry.
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Tanya Zhang
Title: Co-Founder
Company: Nimble Made
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanyazdesigns/
The biggest challenge in the first couple of years of building Nimble Made is taking the leap of faith to leave my stable 9 to 5 job to build something that I personally believed in. When starting a small business, to sell slim fit shirts in a market dominated by the standard European sizing, there’s a ton of design elements that you need to take care and streamline down. It’s incredibly busy to let go of your steady income to market your own product that only had three shirt options to begin with. Without the large inventory and capacity to grow, it was the biggest challenge in choosing to dedicate my entire life to my own business instead, which was exactly what it needed in the end.
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Elizabeth Gordon
Title: Owner & Founder
Company: Luminary Taxes
Linkedin: Elizabeth Gordon Ben-Shalom
1. Giving Family Friends extremely low discounts- you will encounter more losses than profit. Especially, when your friends and family will go to another unrelated family business and pay full price. BIGGEST MISTAKE, I know longer offer any Friends and Family discount, on occasion we will have promotions but NO MORE LOW DISCOUNTS.
2. SPENDING TOO FAST on unnecessary office supplies, marketing expenses and giving too many incentives to employees who haven’t met that loyal peak.. Spending the profit before it earns interest is causing your money to be a risk and the company to be a liability.
3. Hiring the wrong employee, it’s such a waste of productive time, Have several interviews amongst your team, request a copy of the degree, ask the employee to take certain test skills for the job. Such As, Typing test, Accounting Test on the spot Math Calculations related to Tax Preparation
4. Trusting the wrong Vendors with Branding merchandise, small vendors have high risk of shipping delays, poor quality work. Build a relationship with a consistent vendor who provides sample of there work and get feedback from other companies before making a commitment.
5. Keep Track of the day to day functions that come with every department delegating duties. Meaning the CEO, Founder, executives etc. should be well versed or at least understand the functions of all workers under his/ her umbrella. The unknown should never be a response when running your own business.
6. Not creating a Paydeck score sooner rather than later. This helps with Business Funding. and a better business future.
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Bill Prinzivalli
Title: CEO
Company: Prinzivalli Consulting
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billprinzivalli/
Article by Bill Prinzivalli submitted 5/31/22
What has been the biggest challenge you faced in the first years of building your business?
The biggest challenge I faced in the first years of building my business was PATIENCE.
There are so many factors – some controllable, some uncontrollable – that challenge every business, especially new ones.
Controllable factors may include product/service development, messaging and marketing, appropriate pricing, competitive analyses, staying informed of market shifts and economic conditions, developing prospects, operating efficiently, inspiring employees, optimizing your finances, developing your reputation, and developing a vision for your growth. Uncontrollable factors may include economic, competitive, and relative political situations.
Running an existing business is a complex task and is faced with these controllable and uncontrollable factors, even if there is product recognition and market share. Building a new business includes all these complications with the additional challenges of building market share and reputation. Hence, it is not surprising that new businesses fail at an alarming rate.
I note that patience is the biggest challenge for new businesses because there are so many components that need to be initiated, nurtured, and developed – with each requiring its own incubation period to develop. Simultaneously, there is frequently a time restraint to develop these components and to bring in the required sales to keep the company financially afloat.
Each component is critical to the success and each component is generally starting from ground zero. The immensity to develop all of these components satisfactorily is a vast undertaking and is generally performed under some level of stress and/or time limitations. With such requirements, it is easy to see how the lack of patience could cause one to make decisions that would not support the ultimate success of the business. These unwise decisions could include general impulsiveness, changing directions prematurely, the loss of confidence, hasty personnel changes, loss of faith or inspiration, and potentially complete resignation of the mission.
To overcome this challenge of patience is incredibly difficult because patience it is an overarching concept and not a singular activity to be managed. For example, to exercise patience in the development of all required business components requires faith, perseverance, and a strong sense of purpose.
Faith requires a deep belief in yourself, your product/service, your employees, the market interest, your competitive advantage, and your future vision. Perseverance requires a strong will to continually forge forward to conduct the activities related to your belief while in the face of likely resistance. A strong sense of purpose is a necessary driving force for your vision, beliefs, and activities necessary for the business’s success. The absence of any of these attributes will deteriorate the ability to be patient, which in turn may prevent the success of the business.
I applaud all those courageous souls who start a new business. It may be the challenge of their lifetime, while it may also be their greatest inspiration and achievement. It may be their version of living life with gusto and with no regrets. Kudos to all of you.
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Kyle McCorkel
Title: Owner
Company: Safe Home Offer
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-mccorkel-44855b13/
I’m Kyle McCorkel, founder and owner of Safe Home Offer, a marketing company that specializes in finding real estate deals off market. We buy and hold, flip, and wholesale properties, helping current owners out of financial distress and turning those properties around to provide safe and affordable housing for buyers or renters.
I would say my biggest challenge in the first years of building my business was trying to do it all myself. I was the president, the CEO, the CFO, the marketer, the salesman, the janitor, and everything in between. Once I could see the innumerable tasks I was spinning my wheels with, it helped me identify where I could hire employees to delegate the work. I created my org chart at the beginning of 2021, breaking up the individual roles and tasks and assigning myself to each of those roles and tasks. I created an SOP for each role, detailing the tasks in those roles, then I began looking for talent in those specific fields to fill those job descriptions. Once I was able to hire out much of the work I didn’t enjoy doing anyway, I was able to really see how my business could work for me instead of me for my business.
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Cornelius Fichtner
Title: Founder
Company: pm-exam-simulator.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corneliusfichtner/
My biggest challenge is keeping up with the times. Project Management is frequently changing, as is the text and study material. It’s been a challenge to keep up with the changes and keep the courses up to date, and it’s meant a lot of course changes. We’ve even had to change our presentation style at least once, pivoting to eLearning videos and related strategies, but we’ve managed to keep the course material modern and accessible.
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Bara Jabali
Title: CEO/Founder
Company: ChiBatterySystems
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bara-jabali-285b20131
“The most difficult problem is creating a good workplace culture. That ties into keeping my employee’s employed which keeps the business on track and keeping them happy and satisfied with their work. Every other problem comes down to money/time but a trend of unsatisfied workers is detrimental.”
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Melissa Clayton
Title: Founder + CEO
Company: Tiny Tags
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-clayton-817b568/
My biggest challenge in the early years was to stay focused on building a brand and connecting with one segment of the market. I knew I wanted to make jewelry exclusively for mothers because that was the audience I cared about, but It was hard. By doing this, I was missing out on revenue from other segments, and I definitely needed the revenue in the early years! As soon as Mother’s Day was over, there was tremendous pressure to market to brides and graduates because I knew I could sell more jewelry that way, at least in the short term. Plus, all my friends and family would tell me constantly to do that, which didn’t help. But I quickly realized that in the long term, trying to be everything to everybody was not going to help me build a brand. It is easier nowadays, we’ve been able to create a brand for moms exclusively and I am so glad that I stuck it out in the early days. Being single-minded has come with some big wins, like being picked up by Pottery Barn Kids recently. They wanted to partner with Tiny Tags specifically because we stand for something and resonate with a very specific audience.
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Michelle Diamond
Title: CEO
Company: Elevate Diamond Strategy & Diamond Executive Resumes
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-diamond-51693aa
The biggest challenge I faced in the first few years of starting my businesses was balancing business development while delivering for customers and clients. In my first few years, I had consistent work for both businesses based on referrals and initial business development. However, I slacked off on the business development side and found myself with gaps in terms of sales and work. It taught me a lesson to never let that slide and always focus on both.”
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Richard Brandenstein
Title: FBR Law Partner and attorney
Company: FBR Law
Linkedin: N/A
The biggest challenge we faced when first starting our business was the competition with other law firms. It can be quite competitive in New York, and we were worried that more well-known firms at the time would be chosen by clients. However, slowly but surely we built up a client base and credibility and became the success that we are today.
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April Pettiford Bond
Title: Founder/Owner
Company: APB Coaching, LLC
Linkedin: N/A
The biggest challenge for me as an entrepreneur and business coach, in the first years, was finding my customers. Business owners and entrepreneurs often think that coaches and/or mentors aren’t needed. It was difficult in the beginning to show them deficiencies in their systems, and cracks in their business foundations. To get my foot in the door to discuss the need for business coaching, I had to give a lot of free consultations, to communicate the need for my services, and how my services could improve their bottom line. Since then I have consistent coaching clients who now realize that my coaching services are a needed part of their business model that pays for itself, once implemented!
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Laura Rike
Title: Owner, Pinterest Coach
Company: Simply Pintastic
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurarike
One of the biggest struggles for me was time management. I don’t believe in the “balanced life” so many seek because I think that it’s better to look at it as an unbalanced normal. What works for me may not work for everyone. Trying to figure out the schedule between school, younger kids, client communication, team communication, and any virtual meetings that needed to take place felt like spinning plates until I came up with a system. Using a google calendar and time blocking my days with specific names for specific types of tasks has been a game-changer for me, and helps to keep me on track.
I also found it challenging that my team members were outgrowing their roles with my company within a year, causing more turnover than I hoped to have to manage. Again, I was able to come up with systems to lighten the load of onboarding, as well as build on the strengths and allow employees to grow along with the company in order to retain great hires.
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