The Five Common Pain Points of Small Businesses and How to Fix Them

It is normal for small businesses to face several challenges. Every business is struggling with pain points which they need to recover from so they can recreate new strategies to avoid them from happening in the future. Pain points can also be considered a ‘beneficial’ problem as it also helps to establish a well-built business which turns difficulties into positive results. While businesses confront diverse issues, here are the most typical pain points that expanding businesses endure along with practical solutions that may be applied to better improve your company.

Too Many Manual Processes

Manual process is very time-consuming, making it difficult to scale cost-effectively or at a rapid pace.

It frequently necessitates the involvement of additional personnel in the process. As a result, a number of employees will be required to focus on duties that are not part of their core strengths. For example, when a highly compensated person is required to spend time filling out and mailing envelopes with completed schemes and receipts, the process costs can quickly spiral out of control.

To improve efficiency and profitability, businesses must streamline, automate, and measure the effectiveness of processes in their workflow especially across all customer-facing tasks.

Lack of Cash Flow 

Majority of small businesses have insufficient cash flow. Worse, they may have no cash on hand at all. As a result of this predicament, organisations are unprepared to deal with unforeseen occurrences and emergencies.

Simply put, cash flow refers to the entire amount of money flowing in and out of a company. In other words, cash flow problems might jeopardise a small business’s ability to develop and even operate.

The solution is straightforward, but it requires discipline. If you efficiently manage your cash flow, you’ll have a better idea of where you’re currently spending your money, which isn’t visible on your profit and loss statement. It’s critical to understand where and why your money is being spent. This procedure is effective when you also have a budget of present and anticipated spending. The budget can be used to estimate the size of the cash flow.

Establish payment schedules to guarantee that you have the funds to pay your vendors. It’s critical to plan ahead of time so you don’t find yourself with many invoices or bills to deal with at the same time. You can weather short-term emergencies with sufficient cash flow. It also helps you to concentrate on running your organisation during challenging times without having to worry about disrupting operations.

Delayed Customer Support

Customer support is one of the important aspects which your customers are looking at. It is a very important business activity that one should never disregard on their website or even at your physical shop. The front desk is helpful to assist your customer. A chat support system in your ecommerce website, whether it could be a chatbot or live chat, is very useful when handling customer inquiries. Customers always have product inquiries and you must expect this to happen all the time. 

Imagine you have a potential customer who wants to confirm if a certain product suits what she needs and because you don’t have enough customer service support, with all the delayed responses, you will miss out on an important sale. 

As an entrepreneur, you must be prepared with answers to product queries. If you fail to show customers your expertise and answer them with inadequate product knowledge, they will have doubts and might not give you their trust in certain items or services that you are selling.

This type of pain point should be well-addressed. Make sure that you answer their queries on time and allow yourself to be prepared on handling future issues with your products and services.

Tightened Marketing Budget

Planning on how you can boost your sales, grow your audience or build your internet presence online can be a real challenge especially if you are a start-up and a small business. The budget can be difficult to handle on your own. 

Most small businesses lacked the financial resources to compete with the advertising budgets of most large enterprises. 

Instead of using traditional marketing, switch to digital marketing so you can have a better brand positioning. It is possible to sell your products at a reasonable cost through digital marketing. It is very easy to set up social media profiles and begin posting to increase business visibility. Social media nowadays are a good platform to introduce your business with a flexible budget. Start with a simple strategy and once you are able to get a grasp on the tactic on how you can implement a good presence, then you can start doing a paid promotion which later on can help you grow your business.

Tech Skills Shortage

Over the last generation, technological innovation has accelerated, particularly in the fields of internet applications and collaborative technologies. When integrating new technology with legacy systems proves difficult, business operations can suffer.

A company can’t just recruit more “techies” to be successful; it requires tech-savvy entrepreneurs who can swiftly assess needs, utilise cloud services and new technological opportunities, map out the best course of action, and provide timely results. Technology decisions need to be led by the business. It boils down to rethinking and reconsidering priorities. 

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