5 Important Business Challenges You Can’t Solve with Money

small business finance

marketing planMoney doesn’t always buy you success – these business issues unrelated to money can also cause your small business problems

Nine out of ten startups fail during the first five years. Sure, the main cause behind this is usually the lack of funds required to keep the business running, but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, your business will encounter a problem or challenge that isn’t closely related to the monetary issues and therefore can’t be solved with money.

Here are five of business challenges that may occur not related to money.

1.     Determination

One of the business challenges that cause so many businesses to fail is the lack of determination.

Imagine a scenario where you are just establishing your startup, and you need to choose between the niche A and niche B. While the niche A is something that you are generally more interested in, the niche B seems to be more lucrative at the moment, so this is what you eventually opt for.

You see, being a business owner (or a successful person in general) requires many personal sacrifices. This means that unless you are passionate about what you do, your determination will quickly run out, which will drive your business into the ground in no time.

2.     Ambition

Many people tend to mistake ambition for greed. When everything else fails, your ambition will be the one thing driving you forward. Sure, money can be an incredible motivator, especially in large quantities, but it can never substitute a genuine competitive spirit.

We are not talking about competing with others, but trying to outperform yourself day in and day out. Competing with others often gives you an unrealistic challenge seeing how they may work under a different set of circumstances or with different funds. Competing with yourself, on the other hand, can be much more objective.

3.     Desire to do good

One of the most successful businessmen in history, Andrew Carnegie once said:

“Do your duty and a little more, and the future will take care of itself”.

Unfortunately, many new entrepreneurs have little but money on their mind, and nobody can really blame them. You see, it takes quite a bit just to keep your business running during the first few years, so it comes as no surprise that their innate altruism gets temporarily pushed aside. Still, they would be surprised at how little it takes to make a difference in the world.

4.     Ingenuity

Looking at it objectively, there are many downsides to being the new kid on the block. All your competitors already have an established network of contacts, solved logistical issues and experience in the niche (which you desperately lack).

What they don’t have, however, is a fresh (outside) perspective on the matter at hand. This will give you a great opportunity to take a new approach to some of the oldest industry-specific problems and try to resolve them through ingenuity rather than lavish spending. Overall, money is never a perfect substitute for true ingenuity.

small business growth

5.     Being willing to evolve

It isn’t that rare for a powerful corporation to be the least willing to change. After all, once a business model puts down roots, it won’t be moved no matter what, seeing how it requires a huge amount of logistics and bureaucracy to get things moving.

This is where young enterprises have a huge advantage of being much more flexible. For example, introducing live chat to your website might help you improve your sales, but this kind of innovation is more likely to be embraced by an industry’s newcomer rather than its veteran.

Conclusion

One last thing you need to keep in mind is that although money isn’t the most important thing for the success of your enterprise, it is definitely a facilitator. With a moderate budget and the above-listed five traits, you can achieve more than someone with significantly larger funds. Still, in order to get your business steamrolling, you will have to get at least some initial funds; sadly, in today’s world, you won’t be able to bring your ideas to life without some initial capital. Fortunately, in 2017, you have more than a few options for gathering these funds, but this is a story for another time.

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Dan Radak

VPS Security Specialist
Dan Radak is a web hosting security professional with ten years of experience. He is currently working with a number of companies in the field of online security, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies. He is also a coauthor on several technology websites and regular contributor to Technivorz.