Rebounding From Business Setbacks: How You Can Begin To Rebuild

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Rebounding From Business Setbacks: How You Can Begin To Rebuild 

As a business owner, you must be prepared for both the good times and the bad. The reality is not all businesses achieve longevity and most of them will face a hard time at least once in their existence. Almost 20 percent of small businesses fail within the first year of business and by the 10th year, 70 percent of small businesses have folded due to the challenges faced. Having to contend with a fast paced environment, competitive and challenging industry and ever-evolving consumer tastes are only a few of the issues business owners must confront and successfully navigate in order to not only achieve their dreams of expanding their business but sustaining it in the long term. However, what happens when a business hits a rough patch? Can a business recover from the difficult times and what exactly does it take to achieve success after failure in the business world? Read on to find out.

Review Your Plan: The Good And The Bad

Before you can move forward, you must be prepared to analyze and learn from your past. This means reflecting on both the good and imperfect decisions made in your business. A period of reflection and assessment should lead you to the areas of your business that may have solely or jointly caused the rough patch. It is important that you not only identify what got you to this point but exactly how it helped your business arrive at the point. Finally, don’t forget to recognize the processes and distinguishing parts of your business that you did do well. These can become the strong pillars of foundation on which you can rebuild your business. For example; if you were known for your not so stellar customer service, identifying this point will give you a starting point for your relaunch and tells you what needs to change to succeed.

Evaluate Your New Financial Reality

Relaunching or sustaining a business in a difficult time will take a toll on your finances so it is important that you evaluate the ability of your financial resources to do so. Babson College’s 2015-16 Global Entrepreneurship Report identified lack of funding and profits as the contributing factor for over 50 percent of discontinued businesses halting operations. For your rebuilding plans to take shape, you must ensure you have both the human and financial support to make it happen. Therefore, it is wise to take the time to re-evaluate your financial capability and budgets. If your budget falls short of matching your plans, it may be time to consider seeking additional finance from your initial creditor or alternative sources such as P2P platforms and creditor financing. Keep in mind that most crediting institutions will ask to see proof of plans such as a business or marketing plan so prepare ahead and get your marketing strategy nailed down beforehand.

Start Your Market Research From Scratch

Your customers are one of your most vital assets and crucial to your business’ rebuild. Listening to what they want is one of the surefire ways to ensure success. Market research is the best tool to help you gauge this. Approach market research as a new business. In other words, forget any initial research you may have done at the beginning of your business and strategize using a fresh outlook. Begin by redefining your demographic and target audience. In the time since launching, the market conditions would have changed and therefore what once appealed to your customers may not be ticking the right boxes anymore.

Customer feedback platforms and even past customer feedback left on review websites such as Complaint Base can prove useful in formulating the way forward. In them, you can single out complaints and common demands from customers and set about satisfying them. Customer retention is one of the greatest yet undervalued strategies in business profitability and longevity today. From a financial standpoint, boosting your customer retention by just 5 percent can boost your profits by 25-95 percent while acquiring a new customer costs almost five times more than retaining customers. From a marketing standpoint, retained customers are great marketing tools through word of mouth.

On And Off-Line Channels

These days the presence of a business is no longer limited to singular channels. In fact, it is now the norm for businesses to have a presence both online and offline, including on social media. Building up both your physical and digital brand can help customers identify your business. As a bonus, creating a digital brand can be an incredibly cost-effective platform for relaunching your business. Using social media and other digital platforms to build an identity for the business fits in with the way consumers now shop while it also satisfies the customer engagement criteria.

Rebuilding a business after adversity is tough but more importantly, it is possible. One glance at the business industry and you can single-handedly identify multiple businesses that would have experience difficult periods but has rebounded and only grown. The key lies in the way they have handled their setbacks and what they have learned from it. Sometimes, taking a step back and reevaluating can be the best strategy you employ for your business.

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