Launching a business is a responsibility – correction, it’s a huge responsibility. You have to consider a number of things, such as studying the market, getting a Commercial Registration (CR), funding, office location, forming the team, and that’s not even the hardest part yet. You need to constantly find ways to thrive and sustain your business.
In the spirit of Halloween, we at Startup MGZN asked our community about their worst nightmares as entrepreneurs. Based on that, we decided to list you all of the petrifying possibilities that keeps every Bahraini entrepreneur up at night. Grab your mubkhar and light your shaba because you need to ward them evil spirits away from your startup.
- Your revenue drops into the deepest and darkest of pits. What if your sales decline? You lose an investment opportunity? Or a very profitable project? You never know what can happen, but there will always be a chance of your revenue dropping at any time. You can either call up a Shaikh for some special prayer or you can diversify your new sources of revenue. Ask yourself, what can you to recover if you lost that business? Perhaps you can diversify your target customers, products, locations, and even create partnerships.
- You lose your precious clients. Accidents and mistakes happen, but some clients may not care about that. They’ve paid for a service or product and they have expectations – if things go wrong, well you’re in some deep mess. What’s worse? They could post a bad comment or review about you online or spread a negative image about you through word of mouth – we don’t need to mention how small Bahrain is and how everyone knows one another. We don’t mean to scare you here, but you ought to be really careful when dealing with clients – remember the customer is always right, and if you mess up, own up to your mistakes, and try making it up to them. Clients is what keeps your business thriving, keep them closer to you.
- You wake up to your product being obsolete. You finally launch your product, it works for a couple of months, a year max, and then it suddenly fades away and becomes a nostalgic topic that’s hit on repeat with your family and friends – which you obviously blame the economy for (please don’t be that person). Before you launch any product, or make any decisions, they need to be data driven and based on market research. Passion is great, but logic combined with passion is perfection. Do your research, study the market, check whether it’s needed or not, and then make a decision based on that. Here’s another tip: The Central Bank of Bahrain announced their Regulatory Sandbox last year where startups and FinTech firms can test and experiment their solutions for nine months before they can officially launch.
- A natural disaster hits and impacts your business. A tsunami, a storm, or even the economy crashing. Throwback to 2008 anyone? Yeah, not a very nice memory to recall. But these things happen, and they’re inevitable, that’s why you have to prepare yourself for the worst. Have a Plan B, C, and E, just in case you have a rainy day. Also, since technology is rapidly advancing, Artificial Intelligence could possibly help in predicting the future, so fingers crossed!
What does the rest of Startup MGZN’s community think?
- @mohammadsaiyed says: “Not having a strong sales team. Sales is revenue and if your team is not strong enough then it’s a nightmare to run any business. The product and the price doesn’t matter – Those are myth. It’s all about sales as long you have a good product or service that serves the people .”
- @Malsahhaf_ says: “Having a bad word of mouth spread by a customer out of 100 that might affect the reputation negatively! Even if u deliver good services/products which makes it unfair, but yeah, it happens.”
Check out what others had to say about this on our Instagram post.
And what about you? What do you think is an entrepreneur’s worst nightmare? Join the Halloween party and voice out your opinion here.