05 Apr Entrepreneur’s Tip of the Week: You Survived, Now What?

I recently met with a young entrepreneur who just completed five years since her business began. Offering a very attractive and innovative service, she is appropriately proud and pleased with her success. After all, she beat the odds! Within 5 years, 50% of new businesses have failed. Within 10 years that number is 90%. She’s the sole owner of the business and has a variety of directions she could take it at this point. The big question, of course, is now what?

She admits that when she started the business she never expected it to take off the way it did. She didn’t really think through a long term strategic plan, she was too busy just keeping things going, bringing in and servicing customers and just surviving, which was hard enough! She realized that she now has to map out a clear long term path to guide the growth of her business from this point. Is her plan to sell? Go public? Keep generating profit for decades to come? Bring in investors to accelerate growth? Expand her service to more cities? If so through franchising? Direct ownership? How does she even properly make these kinds of decisions since she has never faced them before?

Does this even matter? Why not just keep building and see what happens? Of course a plan is better than no plan. It informs every decision you make, when to hire, what services to offer, what pricing, what marketing and publicity to seek, literally everything. So yes, Virginia, it matters. My advice, especially for a solo entrepreneur, is to start with an advisory board. Folks whose opinion you respect and who have important and relevant experience in working with entrepreneurs or being one. They may have industry experience, but it’s also important to bring that fresh perspective of folks outside of your industry. If you don’t know people like this, go online and seek them out. You’d be surprised how many experienced and successful people in the world of entrepreneurship enjoy mentoring, giving back and the excitement of helping a fast growing company. Compensation may involve a small equity piece or something else you can work out (maybe they can use your service and you trade!). More on this in future posts….