If you’ve ever worked at or tried making your own startup business, then you know just how incredibly difficult it is to maintain and grow. Not only is the environment precarious, but juggling between attending to employee relationships, facing competition, and organizing your financials is a lot to handle. In the rest of this article, we’ll tell you just why making a startup succeed is so hard, but we’ll also give you an excellent resource to help manage it all!
Startup Environment
The nature of a startup environment is very appealing to some, but terrifying to others. This is because a startup environment is new and fresh, meaning it is full of potential. On the other hand, the lack of experience and established success make working at a startup a huge risk. Potential employees have no idea whether or not your startup will succeed, but they are certainly intrigued by the prospect of playing a role in that outcome.
This means that the startup environment is littered with uncertainty. Things may be good today, but who knows what tomorrow will bring? Many aspects of business have uncertainty, but startups have nothing to fall back on, making it very easy for startups to fail. While there is no doubt that you have the ability and tools to make a startup work, you’ll have to keep some key factors in mind when trying to maintain a startup.
Important Factors
Below are the most important factors to determining the success of a startup. Failing to attend to any of them is a surefire way to lead a startup to failure, but if you pay close attention to them, you’ll have the tools you need to make your startup a success.
Employee Loyalty
One of the most difficult aspects of a startup business is your employees. As the owner, you are undoubtedly the brainchild of the operation, but you need employees to offer more. There is a reason why you decided to hire people instead of working alone – you just can’t handle it all yourself!
When it comes to startups, fostering employee loyalty is very difficult, but absolutely critical to ensuring its success. Many people who opt to work for a startup were displeased with environment of a larger corporation, and appreciate the relaxed setting of a startup. Generally speaking, people who leave one company for another aren’t strongly loyal.
That doesn’t mean that everyone who ditches a large company is disloyal. In fact, many people will prefer being loyal to a startup because of how different the culture and environment is. Whatever the situation may be, understand that your employees are your biggest asset. Because of this, you must have a healthy relationship with them to understand their motivations and intentions. This will help you surround yourself with a team carrying a similar mindset.
Handling Competition
No matter what business or industry you operate it, you’re going to run into competition. If you want to create and sell a fun toy for kids, you better believe someone else is going to do the same. They might even copy your idea with minor changes to pass it off as their own.
When it comes to business, there is always competition. Competition is not necessarily a bad thing though, as it creates a market for consumers. It is important for consumers to have options when it comes to purchases, otherwise businesses can form monopolies and charge absurd prices.
Even though competition is good for a consumer, it is not great for a startup business. Startup business often struggle to pay the bills, so any potential revenue being lost definitely hurts. Because of this, you’ll need to find a way to capture as much competition as you possibly can. Even if you have no competition now, it will surely come in time, so you’ll want to have an effective strategy to handle it when it does come.
Organizing Financials
Another not-so-fun aspect to managing a startup is organizing all the financial documents that go along with the business. The thing about a startup business is that it is brand new, and therefore doesn’t have storage or archives. You’ll have to designate storage for your financials, but you’ll have to ensure they stay organized.
This is certainly trickier for a small business to do. In your first year of operation, you might not even know what financial documents are relevant to keep. As a safe bet, keep just about everything related to your business and money neatly organized. The best way to keep your financials in order is actually by passing them off to a professional accountant. This gives you more time to handle your startup and less time fussing over paperwork.
You
Above all, you are the most influential factor in the success of your startup. Creating the startup was your idea, making you the driving force. The startup will only fly as high as you take it, or will crash with you if you don’t keep things afloat.
This is both awful and excellent for you as a startup owner. It is awful because you definitely have the ability to fail, but it is excellent because it gives you every opportunity to succeed. You primarily are responsible for the outcome of your startup, putting all the pressure on you to manage everything!
You’re very talented and smart, but at the end of they day you’re still human. You have needs, wants, and feelings, and sometimes you just won’t want to do things. Startups are a lot of work, but you’ll appreciate the effort when you succeed.
Experienced Accountants
Knowing that running a startup is a lot of work, it makes sense to get some help managing that load. You can certainly handle relationships with your employees on your own, and competition requires a special strategy respective to your business.
One thing that you definitely get help with is organizing your financials! Because the best way to handle them is to let an accountant manage them, you’ll want to find a team of skilled, patient accountants with plenty of experience. The accountants at Evergreen CPAs fit the bill perfectly, using their expertise to help you with a wide variety of accounting needs! They can also help you manage financials for your startup business, letting you worry about factors you can actually influence!
