Summary
Lessons Learned As a “Reluctant Entrepreneur”
Starting and running a successful business can be challenging, especially when one lacks the requisite skills. However, smart entrepreneurs always strive to learn what it takes to build a thriving and sustainable company. Building a robust business entails dedication, hard work, planning, and more. As a business owner, you must consistently put efforts into sales and marketing campaigns to drive growth. In addition, you must understand the nitty-gritty of your business niche and show expertise to stand out of the pack and build trust and loyalty. In today’s podcast, Mike Konrad from Aqueous Technologies and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss ‘Lessons Learned As a “Reluctant Entrepreneur.
The Journey to Entrepreneurship
The journey to entrepreneurship can be tricky and challenging. When building a business many company owners get stuck and find it difficult to take them to the next level because they lack the requisite knowledge to do so. Little wonder, about 75% of businesses fail before their tenth year of operation.
However, every aspiring entrepreneur should strive to acquire the requisite skillset to bootstrap their company to grow and remain sustainable. In other words, they should get the skills required to build their business, the skill needed to grow their company, and the skill required to sustain the business. Read on to learn the tips to help you build a thriving and sustainable business.
Tips for Building a Successful Business
Running a company is a marathon, not a sprint, and can be quite a rollercoaster with its share of challenges. With this in mind, to build a successful business, you must be hard-working and dedicated and have processes and procedures in place.
Smart business owners don’t run their businesses on trial and error but follow specific strategies to improve their sales, cash flow, and net worth. To build a thriving company, you must constantly learn to remain on top of your game. Below are the tips for building a successful business. 
Funding
When starting a business, what comes to mind first is financing. Funding is at the heart of every business operation, and it’s even more critical for young companies yet to break even and build their revenue base.
More often than not, many entrepreneurs have difficulty getting the necessary cash that will help them keep their businesses afloat. This is because they majorly depend on commercial banks as their source of financing. However, banks don’t care about the potential of your business and business plan. Instead, banks’ utmost concern is your cash flow, collateral, credit history, and financials. And when you’re found wanting in of these they instantly reject your loan application.
Notwithstanding, some alternative lenders offer favorable loan terms to small businesses. For instance, Financing Solutions offers unsecured business lines of credit to small businesses to maintain a regular cash flow. Moreover, unlike traditional banks, the Financing Solutions line of credit has numerous benefits, including a straightforward application and a quick approval process, and it’s inexpensive when used. That said, angel funding, venture capitalist, and factoring are other veritable funding sources for entrepreneurs.
Improve Your Cash Flow
Cash flow is an essential aspect of building a successful small business. The amount of money that comes and goes out of your company is a critical factor in determining the trajectory of your company.
As an entrepreneur, you should ensure a regular cash flow to make payroll, pay rent, and cater to emergencies or business opportunities. There’s no doubt that maintaining cash flow at the early stage of a building can be pretty daunting, especially when sales are low. However, a line of credit can be your reliable go-to when cash flow is insufficient to take care of your business needs.
Have a Marketing Strategy
No matter the size of your business and how great your product and service are, if you don’t have an effective marketing campaign, people will hardly know that your company exists. In order to maximize sales and generate profit you must put a concerted effort into marketing.
Effective marketing strategy entails educating customers about your products and services and letting them know how they can be the ideal solutions to their problems. When you educate your customers, they will make informed choices and care less about prices. If you can gain a reputation for being technically sound and competent in your field, people will seek you out and let you guide them when making their buying decisions.
An effective method of educating customers and reaching out to wider audiences is leveraging content marketing, which involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and keep your target audience.
Building a successful small business entails finding ways to generate leads and make profitable conversions through education strategy, direct mail, SEO marketing, and more. In other words, you must figure out how to make customers come to you and also have a metric for measuring your marketing effort to build a successful business.
Hire the Right People
No one knows it all and in business, expertise matters a lot. You can’t be the CEO, CTO, COO, and more while building your company. You must hire the right people to handle specific tasks.
The right team will help complement your areas of weaknesses and adopt the right skills at the right time to take your business to the next level. By understanding the purpose behind what you do and setting clear expectations, you can attract talents that fit your ideals and help grow your company.
Hire a Business Coach
Having a coach is pertinent to building a thriving business. A business coach can help you to make good use of your talents and abilities. Plus, they can help you with productive strategies that fit into your business.
An experienced professional will make your entrepreneurial journey less challenging as they will help you put systems and processes in place for getting work done more efficiently so that you can achieve the desired result quickly.
Learn About Our Guest
Mike began his career in the electronic assembly equipment industry in 1985. Mike founded Aqueous Technologies in 1992 in response to the Montreal Protocol and the resulting international treaty banning the most popular cleaning/defluxing solvents.
Mike is an internationally known award-winning speaker on the subject of increasing reliability through contamination removal and cleanliness quantification techniques and procedures as well as on Entrepreneurship. He was also awarded “Distinguish Speaker Status” with SMTA in 2018 and received the “Rich Freiberger Best of Conference Award” in 2019.
Mike is the host of the popular Reliability Matters Podcast available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast sites.
Learn About Financing Solutions
Financing Solutions provides an easy-to-setup unsecured small business line of credit to small businesses. The small business financing product is a great cash backup plan that costs nothing to set up, nothing until used, and is inexpensive when needed. Financing Solutions is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and 5 stars by the BBB/Google Reviews.
Unlike a traditional business bank loan, our business credit line requires no collateral or personal guarantee (except in fraud cases), making it an excellent alternative business financing option. Small businesses often use their line of credit for short-term expenses, working capital, to make payroll, or for business investment, especially when business cash flow is temporarily down.
Get a free, no-obligation business line of credit quote by filling out our simple 2- minute business line of credit application here.
Remember: The time to set up a credit line is when you don’t need it.
