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REGULAR CHALLENGES OF THE ENTREPRENEUR – In relation to this are; The 8 Biggest Challenges for New Entrepreneurs, The Top 10 Challenges Faced By Entrepreneurs Today, The Top 10 Challenges You’ll Face as a New Entrepreneur (and how), The challenges of growing a business – and how. The Challenges Faced by Entrepreneurs in South Africa, Regular Challenges Of The Entrepreneur


Others are; challenges entrepreneurs face when starting a business, challenges faced by entrepreneurs, problems faced by entrepreneurs while starting business, problems faced by entrepreneurs when setting up in business, challenges of entrepreneurship in developing countries, common problems of entrepreneurs, problems faced by entrepreneurs in India, problems faced when starting a business.

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As you can see, these are challenges facing businesses and how they overcome them. Entrepreneurs face a lot of challenges in business regularly, especially the young ones. In fact, entrepreneurs face many challenges in today’s business world than ever before. Fortunately too, contemporary times have also blessed entrepreneurs with more resources for tackling those problems than ever before.

That means, you should see these challenges as a task that must be overcome. With clear focus and dedication these challenges will be overcome. To start with, you have to Trust Yourself, and then ask for help.


The following lists the “Top 9” challenges faced by entrepreneurs today, defines why each problem exists, and offers solutions so you can operate an efficient and successful business:

Follow me on step by step analysis of the various challenges faced by entrepreneurs today.
1. Insufficient Capital:

This in fact is a major plague to many start-up businesses. Lack of start-up capital will make a would be entrepreneur not to start at all, while insufficient capital could cripple the activities of an existing business man. So at all time, whether you are a beginner or an existing entrepreneur ensure you have enough capital to run your business.

Sources of start-up capital are: personal and family savings, partners contributions, investors fund (seed /angels capital), bank loan (money market), government grants, NGO grants.
As the business grows other forms of capital that will be very necessary are: bank overdraft, credit facilities, investors from capital market ( venture capital) , etc.
An angel investor is an affluent member of the public who privately provide fund for businesses at start-up as equity stakeholder in the business.

In Nigeria today, there are government programs that provide funds for small scale entrepreneurs as revolving loan. Many None Governmental Organizations (NGO) do the same also, some times an outright gift for the poor and the indigent members of the public. But most of these agencies will demand a well articulated Business Plan and feasibility study from you before they give you such monies. Therefor one of the things you must do is to have a good business proposal in place at all times.

2. Weak Management:


The knowledge and skills of a creative entrepreneur do not necessarily amount to being an efficient manager. You can be creative, and productive but weak in coordinating the other factors of production. You may not also be a good marketer. Where goods/services are there but are not translated into cash/turnover, the business will suffer cash flow problems which is an essential part of the business working capital. A weak management team will give rise to inadequate business plans, poor goal settings and inadequate tactical/operational performances. My dear, this is a big challenge indeed.

Associated with the above is total lack of management team.


To build a management team requires experience and hard work. The first leg here will involve finding the efficient staff at cheap cost. The next step is role definitions – schedule of activities, and staff training. This will involve designing the organ-o-gram of the organization which will establish the vertical and horizontal line of authority. It involves the motivation of every member of the team to work together as a team.


Where management team or anything like it is totally not in existence, there is no need of talking about weak management. Make sure you have a functional Management Team in place.

3. Lack of Entrepreneurial Roles in management:

You must certainly be part of the management team, because there are certain things that must be left for you alone. You have to be the:

Visioner: as a visionary leader you should be able to see the today and tomorrow of the business and so design it. You should be able to plan the growth, maturity and the exit of the business. In that case you should be able at any time to answer such question as; at what growth/maturity level is your business? How long will your business exist? That means you should be able to plan the business exit early enough especially put a succession plan in place.


Rule maker : You have to make rules which the business must follow. You have to make industrial relations rules ranging from production or service delivery rules to labour relations as quality of staff, vacation conditions, and administrative routine procedures. In relation to corporate governance, these rules are not easy to make.


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Decision maker: Entrepreneurs make hundreds of decisions a week. A special fatigue called ‘decision fatigue’ could be very stressful. These are special challenges which you must face on daily bases. Where they are not properly taking care of, they posse big surviving threats. You must not allow yourself and your business get to this level. A good management team can help you out. That means a functional scalar chain must be in place.


4. Ineffective Marketing:
This is where marketing is not effective. Ineffective marketing does not produce any good result.


What is Effective Marketing? Effective marketing produces good results. Effective Marketing must have the following components:

Traditional marketing mix elements of product, pricing, promotion and distribution in addition to modern market strategies of mega-marketing, demarketing and relationship marketing should be appropriately utilized.

I hope you have been following? The technicalities involved in this segment may be very challenging for you.
5. Being a Novice:

Industry knowledge is very important to business survival. Every business has one or more secrets that keeps it going. Certain industry may require some basic professional education. For instance, you can not practice law if you are not a layer. In the same vein you can not practice accounting, auditing and tax management if you are not a Chartered Accountant.


If you are a novice you will face more challenges and may end up wasting so much resources before packing-up. A good approach is to hire an experienced staff. Such an experience staff must be among your management team. All other staff including you can be trained.


6. Inability to abandon ones career.


Starting a business and watching it grow to maturity demands your personal attention. If you want your business to grow you have to be there personally. Weekend attentions will not be enough. You have to quite your official wage work.

A friend of mine wanted to start a consultancy firm in partnership with a civil servant, but somebody advised against doing a business with a serving civil servant because he will not have the time needed for the business. My friend had to realize the truth in this opinion after two years of fruitlessness.


7. Legal matters:


Legal matters are challenges too. You have to sort out what legal requirements or policies that affect your business so as to tackle them head long.


Country’s industrial laws some times posse serious threat to businesses. Such matters like foreign exchange policies, other monetary policies and fiscal (tax) laws, could limit an entrepreneurs activities – economic recessions and booms have always been as a result of these policies one way or the other. Environmental laws also are important. In extractive industry – both in oil and gas sector and solid mineral sector, environmental laws are very important.


Labour laws and the judicial system in this relation, could deter economic progress, and therefore a big challenge to the entrepreneur.


8. Politics:


This is seriously becoming a serious global economic challenge especially where it has some religious inclinations. An example is the resent immigration laws being introduced in US by the present, President Donald Trump. Belief me a lot of businesses will be affected by this. This can breed security challenges. Businesses don’t do well in a state of insecurity.

9. Good governance:

Generally, the type of governance in place may detect the tone of business in such economic setting. You must know that good governance promotes even development, good economic policies, good educational system, rule of law, even distribution of income, good infrastructural development etc. The point is that where this is lacking, the economic or the industrial community suffers. You may be facing one problem or the other in your business due to lack of good governance in your country of operations. Our take on this is that you should consider to what extent it affects your business so that you can make good business decisions. A good decision may be to leave such an economic environment for a favourable one elsewhere.


The governance issue has raised a lot of challenges which include the following:


Lack of Infrastructure – The first business challenge you will face when doing business in most developing countries including Nigeria is infrastructural challenge. Nigeria lacks the basic infrastructure and logistics to support entrepreneurship. If you are going to run a successful business in Nigeria; then you must have the financial muscle to provide your own infrastructure.


Poor Power Supply – Poor power supply is the next challenge militating against the successful growth of small business start-ups in Nigeria. Successful companies operating in Nigeria has found a way to deal with the challenge of power supply by providing their own power.


Security Challenges- Security is the next challenge you must deal with especially if you are a foreigner wanting to invest in building a business in Nigeria. But I think it’s worthwhile to add that there has been a massive step up by the government with respect to security.


Inconsistent Government Policy- Government policy inconsistency is really a challenge you will have to tackle if you must succeed in Nigeria as an entrepreneur. Governance is something entrepreneurs have no control over; all entrepreneurs can do is try to influence government’s policy with respect to enacting favourable business laws.

Poor transportation Network- The next challenge of doing business in Nigeria is the poor transportation standard. As expected; the dependable source of raw materials you need may not be situated close to your target market. So you will have to decide if to locate your business close to the raw materials or close to your market. Either way; transportation of either raw materials or finished goods will be involved and this will pose a great challenge.


Inability to access funds – Of all the business challenges involved with starting a small business in Nigeria; this one interest entrepreneurs the most. Inability to access funds and banks unwillingness to support entrepreneurship and small business is the major barrier to massive entrepreneurship growth in Nigeria.


However, this challenge can be surmounted if you are a die hard, creative entrepreneur. Hard core entrepreneurs are not held back by the lack of support from banks; they are not discouraged by the unavailability of start-up capital. Rather than lament over the predicament, they look for creative ways to finance their business plans and ideas


I know that these few last points do not actually rest on your efforts. But I know that the civil society organisations all over the world are doing so much to mount pressure upon governments to implement policies that will engender economic growth.

I encourage entrepreneurs to outsource some of their functions for efficient management of resources. You could contact experts for this.