What is your biggest challenge as a small business owner?

Ours is making sure we are spending our time in the right areas. As a small business owner it is so difficult to sit down and prioritize projects and initiatives because you want to do them all. As one person has said it is not about winning the race it is about deciding which race to run in.

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Ours is trying to find good people and hanging on to them. Often we find someone then we lose them because we do not have the growth opportunities that a larger firm has.

Ours is trying to find the right type of employee. One that has not worked at a huge company and has a very narrow skill set. We often find great people but they can only really help us out in one or two areas we like to hire generalist but it is often hard to find these type of people because most people typically focus on one type of function.

Ours is managing our cash flow it always seems our business is on a feast or famine cycle we are either getting so much business that we do not know what to do with or we have none. I know we need to do a better job at building up our cash reserves but it is easier said than done!

We work with a lot of big companies and our challenge is keeping up with them in all fronts. They expect us to have the resources, technology and staff to be as flexible as them and unfortunately we cant be.

I'd like to make a suggestion to Triton and Ace. Have either of you tried using virtual office assistance? With a virtual office assistant, they are skilled in a number of areas (accounting, marketing, administrative assistance), and by partnering with a virtual office assistant, you can use their experience to help you run your business more effectively without the headaches of a full-time employee, or struggling to find employees that can do everything.

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I have a hard time finding quality time to spend working on my business (as it is still a part-time thing).

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Easejennifer hi and welcome to the forum. Yes we use some of the freelance sites like guru and elance to get admin help when we need it but will keep your firm in mind for future work. Thanks.

Thanks Ace. I was just wondering, because not everyone had heard of Virtual Assistance before. I thought that might be something you might not know about it but would work for you.


As far as I'm concerned, my biggest problem is time. There's so much to do when you run your own business, it takes alot of planning and discipline to stick to a schedule and get everything done.

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