Growing through your challenges as an entrepreneur

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Hitting the pedal and getting your business to a successful start is actually tougher than it looks or sounds. For every entrepreneur, this is the most important and of course the most challenging aspect of being an entrepreneur. However, as a matter of fact, every stage of entrepreneurship comes with its own challenge, and every challenge tends to throw the entrepreneur off his balance. Coming on top after each challenge is paramount to business failures and success, as the case may be.

As the saying goes, ‘what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger’; overcoming any challenge at any stage of one’s business not only means that the business will continue to grow, it also means that the entrepreneur has once again added more to his wealth of experience and knowledge and have become an even better entrepreneur.

The validity of this claim however, depends on how the entrepreneur tackled his challenges. Sometimes, entrepreneurs only manage to scale through challenges, but fail to grow significantly in experience. While the business had survived the initial scare, it only lives to fight another day as the entrepreneur has as a matter of fact not learnt from the past event.
Overcoming challenges is hence markedly different from growing through challenges. To grow through challenges as an entrepreneur, one has to work through developing valid preventive measures and lasting solutions to the challenges and as well possible ways of coping through it.

Empirical approaches to problem solving as an entrepreneur not only sets one’s path towards efficient and effective problem solving, it also makes an entrepreneur a ‘master of his ship’. He grows through the challenges, on a relapse, he solves this challenge with much more ease or moves to prevent them from occurring at all. Every entrepreneur desire to do this, unfortunately, not every entrepreneur has developed this skill. Acquiring this attitude towards problem solving requires stepwise approach to handling challenges…

To grow through challenges as an entrepreneur, there’s a need to carefully walk through the following questions:

What is the challenge?

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Probably the easiest question to answer, but that’s not the fact most times. Getting to know what the real challenge could be tedious. Just like in human health, sometimes, the outward appearance of your challenge could be a mere symptom of an even bigger or smaller challenge which needs to be tackled. Diagnosing as an entrepreneur is essential in finding out what the real hinge is. In finding out your real challenge, one needs to critically study the issue, it not a bad decision to take a look at similar challenges encountered by other entrepreneurs in the past. History do repeat itself. Seeking mentorship from fellow entrepreneurs who have scaled through similar challenges will always be resourceful. Pushing the rock alone might be too hard for you.

why am I having this challenge?

Everything happens for a reason, getting to know the cause of any issue is the first and most important step towards preventing a repeat. Have a flashback, get to know what you’ve not done right in the previous stages of your growing start-up. A calm flashback and chronologic reminiscence will help you in your journey towards remembering why it happened in the first place. Which decisions shouldn’t have been made or should have been made? Most times the past is the architect of the present and answers most questions we have about the present. Consulting the past is definitely a wise step to take after finding out what your challenge really means.

How do I overcome this challenge?

You might have skipped other steps to land here, that’s also the case with many entrepreneurs, the zeal to get rid of an issue and progress to other stages of business appears to be more important for most entrepreneurs, even in our daily life, we often fall into this situation. Rush not! Having satisfied the first two steps, overcoming your challenges surprisingly becomes easier than you initially thought.

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To every challenge is a solution, for most cases, there is an array of solutions to any problem. Finding them could become the biggest issue here. Once again, taking a look at how other entrepreneurs solved similar issues could be resourceful.

This will certainly give you hints to help you develop your own solution. Sometimes following same route as others solves the problem, this should be done with caution however as conditions may be different for both cases. In developing your own solution using resources from experiences of fellow entrepreneurs, consider alternative ways of doing it even better, this sets your paths towards becoming a better entrepreneur than your predecessors. Endeavour to choose affordable and long-lasting solutions which can be duplicated to produce similar results.

To be fair, problem solving could be very tricky, but organized stepwise approach to tackling challenges makes an entrepreneur a seasoned ‘problem solver’ and one who grows with each challenge.