When you are just beginning your entrepreneurship journey, there will be many problems you will have to resolve. Knowing what to do, where to do it and when to do it is a journey by itself. Although hard, it is a self-rewarding journey. According to this study, current business owners rated their level of happiness with an average of eight on a basic scale of one to ten, with ten being the happiest.
Shutterstock Licensed Photo – By Monkey Business Images
Humans evolved by hunting and foraging for hundreds of thousands of years, not by running a complex business operation. As such, none of us is born as an entrepreneur or with knowledge about running a successful business built inside us. Those things must be learned, memorized and improvised along the way, and many will end up with several terrible mistakes. Hopefully not repeated too many times.
The beginning of the journey is especially dangerous since you won’t have years of experience to back you up in times of crisis and allow you to make smart and educated guesses. These next few business management tips and advice can help you alleviate this.
Customer service
Every for-profit company must be in its core a for-people company. When someone spends cash on your services or products, they expect to be served as best as possible. And if the service doesn’t suit them, they will use their money elsewhere.
One way of creating the best possible user experience is having high-quality customer service. With high-quality customer service, it’s possible to increase the growth of your business and make numerous satisfied and loyal customers. A low-quality one will result in things such as a viral Facebook complaint or dozens of bad reviews and comments, which can ruin years of efforts spent on creating a respectable business.
How can you create great customer service? For instance, buy a 1300 number. It has better built-in call handling options than a standard landline number has, allowing the routing of calls based on different answer points-based criteria such as time and day, location and availability. It will also allow you to keep the same number even if your company relocates while landline numbers offer very limited portability.
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Their increased functionality enables combining with other telecommunication services such as VoIP, outbound calling and high-speed internet, all leading to increased customer satisfaction, ultimately leaving you with loyal and satisfied customers, those that return to buy again and again.
Be brave
“Bran thought about it. ‘Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?’ ‘That is the only time a man can be brave,’ his father told him.” George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones.
Running a business is a long, burdensome journey. 70% of businesses fail within the ten-year period. Don’t get discouraged by setbacks, and learn to enjoy the process. Unless you’re looking only to cash out as fast as you can and have already built an exit strategy, you have a long entrepreneurial career before you.
As with other aspects of life, business and entrepreneurship have their rhythms, their flows and tides, their ups and downs. And there will be many ups and downs for you, even in the same week or day. You will find big clients and lose even bigger ones for reasons that had nothing to do with you. And this is all a part of having a business.
New employees should be trained well
It’s funny how people think that when they hire a new employee, there will be an offload of commitments and responsibilities and less work to do. The truth cannot be more different. When you hire any new employee, you can actually expect a temporary increase in the work required. This is because no new employee, no matter how smart or experienced they are, will be able to get used to your specific type of business instantly.
They will need some time to learn about all the nuances and shades of work, to understand what is expected of them and to mentally acclimate there. They aren’t sprinting champions but marathon runners, running alongside you in your business journey. Their competence will make them feel proud and empowered in what they do.
Invest time in training them properly, so they can do their job as well as possible. This applies no matter how many times they have already been in the same work role and no matter how many companies they have worked for. Yes, they have done the same work, yes, they have worked at similar companies, so the assumption is that it should be all the same. It won’t be.
Do this unless you want a high turnover rate and to end up with a lot of wasted time spent on correcting your employees’ mistakes. 40% of employees with poor training leave their job within the first year.
Take a deep breath, remember why you started your journey, and with enough luck and strength, your company’s success will be the one you remember the most.