Knowing how to sustain your business is essential for every business person. Small businesses can fail and numerous big businesses have failed too. So, achieving business sustainability is not a matter of size, there are secrets to it too. Knowing how to sustain your business is different from knowing how to plan. Businesses that plan the most, fail the most if they don’t execute the plans. One action is much better than ten thousand good intentions void of action.
Almost every start-up in a bid to rise to business sustainability write a 26page business plan. I’ve personally helped a lot of startups with that too but some never follow through to implementation. All they needed it for was to win an investor or raise some funds or attract a kind of partnership after which it’s filed away and never used until some kind of problem arises.
The secret to knowing how to sustain your business success lies on these 4 things.
1. Team and leadership
If you must learn how to sustain a business, you must learn how to lead and attract the right talents to your team. The success of every business lies in the leadership of the business. I would love to ask you this question, feel free to answer it on the comment session. The question is on the picture below. Remember it’s asking you about the most important, all of them are important but what do you consider as the most important in a business? I will be in the comment session to conclude it, give my opinion and why I think so.
2. Grow big but stay small
Have you noticed that when businesses start newly, they listen to every user complain? They want to understand users’ needs and are conscious of their product pricing. But once they penetrate the market, everything changes. They become too big to listen to customers. They raise product prices and even reduce quality. For businesses like this, they think becoming a market leader means abusing the customers’ choice. They understand business growth but do not understand how to sustain a business growth
Let me borrow some illustration from how religious organizations sustain growth. Churches grow and establish branches in major countries in the world but still break into smaller cell groups of 5-20. They grow big but stay small, with this, every member is cared for. This can apply to businesses too.
As a business, you need to know what attracted your customers to you and try to improve it better so you can keep them loyal while attracting more people. One major challenge big businesses have is difficulty in decision making and time delay of execution. Complains from clients to customer service takes time to climb the organizational ladder from head of the customer service to branch leader to area manager to regional manager to the country head and then the board members sit for meeting many days on the matter before making decisions.
The result is then passed down from region to area to branches and then to workers making changes take so much time. This waste of time is enough for a new business to disrupt the market and end your business, This is not how to sustain your business the right way. I would have mentioned names in the banking industry, phone industry, Telecom, and certain household products but that would mean putting some brand in a bad image that won’t be healthy. While expanding and growing, stay small enough to be closer to your customers either by directing customers’ complain directly to the top managerial level or giving lower managerial level enough power to make decisions in seemingly smaller issues.
3. Policies and market trend
A single policy is enough to kill a business or boost another business. The closing of borders in Nigeria around September 2019 has ended a lot of business and of course, has boosted a lot of locally made goods too. A single policy, be it government or any other authority guiding your business operation can end your business. In 2018, the Chinese government expelled all Korean businesses out of China and a lot of businesses died instantly irrespective of how big or how small they were. If you must know how to sustain your business, you must also learn how to position your business to favorable policies and market trend
How can you use this to your benefit?
Know what the government is interested in and align your business with that. Look at the yearly budget of your government, what projects do they want to promote, and then align your business to that. If the government is interested in promoting locally made goods, begin to align and make a shift to that. Makeshift especially to areas where the government wants to pump in money either as a grant, tax break or loans
Coming to market trends, things evolve to kill another. The days of kerosene lanterns have ended and given room to rechargeable lanterns and energy-saving bulbs. If you fail to understand and obey the market trend, your business will be as good as dead. The law of business sustainability is simple; Evolve or dissolve. if you cannot evolve, why not become a fast follower?
Read more: What fast following means in business and how Chinese businesses are using it to grow and sustain their businesses
4 Never run out of money
What else do you sustain in a business when cash flow isn’t sustained? Sometimes in business, we know what to do that will take our business to a high level. We know just exactly what to do that will solve that business problem. We just know how to sustain a business rightly, We exactly know that next market move that once we make that move we will earn so much profit. But why don’t we do it? Money. Yes, money. little or no cash to implement.
When businesses run out of money and don’t know how to attract investment either through equity or loans, it usually becomes the end of that business no matter how big they are. This is why you hear that a business closed down or that a business has been bought over by another business. Some businesses incur a lot of debt at a time like this just to scale through or probably merge with another. The advice is simple. Never Run Out of Money.
Reminder
I asked you a question at the beginning of this article, please scroll up and look at the question again. I will be waiting in the comment session to give a conclusion. There are a lot more questions like that on our Instagram page
