How To Make Peace With Losing Money As An Entrepreneur

When we first start businesses we tend to look at everything through rose-tinted glasses, particularly if you have done your research and are already salivating about potential profits. Unfortunately, things don’t always work to plan with 1 in 5 businesses going out of business within the first 18 months. If you currently have a business but your finances are starting to look less than peachy it can be easy to feel overwhelmed with stress as you watch your creation start to flounder; particularly if you have invested a significant amount of money in the business. But don’t fret, there may still be things that you can do to improve your situation.

Work Out How To Reduce Business Expenses Where Available

Reduce Your Spending On Utility Bills: 

You may be spending more than what you need to on utility bills such as electricity, gas, phone, and internet. There are price comparison websites online where you can compare the best deals from utility suppliers. Generally, the bigger your business premises are the more savings you are likely to see but even smaller businesses can save a tidy sum by being more savvy with their utility bills. When you are searching for deals online make sure you are going on websites of legitimate businesses that have the green padlock on the top left of your browser, this can reduce your chances of falling for online scams. 

Move Your Marketing Online:

 Is your business currently advertising on the radio, newspaper or even on television? There are other ways you can advertise your business such as creating and maintaining a social media presence for your business, through social media you can keep your customers updated about your business and run paid social media advertisements; you can set these to only show to people living in specific areas, additionally you can tell the social media platform to only show to people that are within a specific age group catchment.

Other things you can try include email marketing, where you collect customers’ email addresses and then send them special offers to their email mailboxes which hopefully inspires them to use your business again in the near future. You may also want to look at what your competitors are doing in terms of marketing and try to emulate that in a cost-effective way. 

Reduce Your Opening Times And Use Part Time Or Freelance Staff

If you have noticed that there is a specific day or time that there’s a lack of customers you may want to consider closing down your shop for a couple of hours, or if your business has low customer footfall for the last hour of trading you may want to consider starting to close earlier. This means that you don’t have to pay your staff for as many hours which reduces your business expenses 

Evaluate Your Customer Base And Your Most And Least Bought Products/Services

Make an effort to understand the main customer base of your business, using this information you can start to make decisions as a business to most satisfy this customer demographic, based on factors such as customer age, the area your customers live in relation to your business and the type of person that comes in your shop. 

Another thing you can do once you have a better understanding of your customer base is starting to evaluate your most and least bought products or services, this allows you to discontinue items or services that are less popular than others which may help you reduce your operating costs as there may be less product waste.

Still Losing Money? Here’s What You Should Do

• Find An Outlet For Your Stress: In your downtime you should throw yourself into your hobbies, doing things that make you happy can improve your overall mindset and help you make more rational business decisions which may help your business’s financial decisions. Another thing you can do is to start exercising regularly, such as going to the gym or going running; at first, exercising regularly may seem difficult and just another thing you have to do, but over time you will notice mental benefits as the additional endorphins are produced in your brain as a result of exercise. Endorphins are happiness chemicals that can help alleviate stress, anxiety and depression.

• Reach Out To Your Community: By networking and speaking to other entrepreneurs you can not only learn business strategies but you can also learn how to alleviate stress from other entrepreneurs; running your own business can be incredibly stressful but luckily there are lots of people who understand what you are going through. You should also reach out to your family and friends to see if they have any useful tidbits of advice for you.  

You Can Bounce Back

There are still things you can do to bounce back as a business if you find yourself in the red, it is about being proactive, coming up with a plan and acting on it as soon as it is reasonably possible. It is always worth getting in touch with a life coach to assess your current situation and figure out a plan to build your business back up, and become the best version of yourself.