(Akiit.com) Last year, the number of African Americans who owned small businesses rose by a massive 400 percent. It’s clear that more of us than ever before are deciding to take our working lives in our own hands by becoming entrepreneurs.
This is an exciting development, but anyone who does start their own business will know that it can be difficult to get things off the ground. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you business owners to focus on growing your business in those early days:
Design Your Vision
If you don’t have a vision for what you want your business to be and how you want it to grow, it’s going to be difficult to achieve very much at all. So, if you haven’t already, sit down and take some time to design your vision.Think about how large you want your company to be; what kind of brand you want to build; who you want to work for you; how involved you want to be, etc, and then you can work on creating a pathway that will get you there.
Be Clear About Where You Are Now
Of course, you won’t be able to plow ahead with your vision if you don’t take stock of where you are right now, which means that you also need to take a little time to look at your business as it is. Work out which products and services sell the most, how much profit you are generating and where you’re strengths and weaknesses currently lie, as well as how much capital you are likely to need to generate growth. Once you have this information at your fingertips, you can work on drawing up that path that will take you towards your goals.
Outsource as Much as You Can
It can be difficult to find the money to pay others to do the work for you when you’re running a small business, but whenever you possibly can, it’s worth outsourcing tasks that you aren’t amazing at to third parties so that you can focus on making your vision a reality. For example, if you visit this website, you can hire someone else to manage your IT infrastructure, freeing up your time to create a killer new product or schmooze potential business partners who could give you the capital you need to expand. It’s possible to outsource anything from your bookkeeping to admin, and doing so is often the smart choice when you weigh up the cost of paying someone to do it for you with the amount of revenue you could generate in the time those tasks would usually take you.
Have Accountability
Often, the hardest part of growing your business is staying focused on the goal, and keeping up on the tasks that will get you there. To stay on track, it may be worth getting an accountability buddy who knows your plans and will work to keep you on track.
Growing any business is a challenge, but if you stay focused, there is no reason why you could not succeed.
Staff Writer; Brad Hall