Challenges of Entrepreneurs: 5 Big Entrepreneurial Challenges in Africa
Have you ever thought about the challenges of entrepreneurs in Africa? Many young Africans would rather work for themselves instead of applying endlessly for white-collar jobs. Entrepreneurship has become a trend in this part of the world. Interestingly, many fail to watch out for the challenges that come along with entrepreneurship.
Would you like to be an entrepreneur or are you already an entrepreneur in Africa? You should continue reading this post to find out the challenges of entrepreneurs in this part of the globe. Knowing these challenges helps you to prepare ahead and improve your planning processes.
5 Challenges of Entrepreneurs in Africa
Working Hours
The idea most people have of working for themselves is that they have a lot of free time. You can decide when to work and when to chill or hang out with your friends. To be sincere, this notion is not entirely true.
Yes, you choose your working hours as an entrepreneur. However, you are likely to work almost all day and all night long. Every waking moment seems to have your mind focused on growing your business or improving your products. It is a vicious circle of work, work, and more work.
The good news is that as you grow your business and get more employees, the workload gradually reduces. While you wait for that to happen, get ready to work your socks off in the first few years.
Lack of Benefits
The lack of benefits, especially at the infancy stage of a business, is among the major challenges of entrepreneurs. This challenge is not peculiar to entrepreneurs in Africa alone, entrepreneurs all over the world experience it. If you are working under someone, you are assured of a salary at the end of the month. However, when you are working for yourself, you must be sure that the business gains first.
Even when you are getting some benefits, you are likely to sacrifice them if the business experiences a challenge. We advise that you should forget about paid vacations, gym membership, health insurance, for the first few years. You can survive without these benefits for the first few years before your business stabilizes.
Hiring Staff
The natural African thing to do when you have a new business is to employ family members and friends. Asides from the fact that it helps you save money on employee payments, it allows you to maintain these relationships. But then, an important question crops up. Are these individuals qualified enough to handle the responsibilities of their jobs?
One of the biggest challenges of entrepreneurs in this regard is that the available hands aren’t always qualified. If you are going to take your business to the peak, then you need qualified hands, not available hands. It is quite challenging to conduct interviews while working hard to grow your firm. A simple solution to this challenge is to seek the services of a human resource firm to handle your recruitment.
Product Choice
Choosing what product to invest in is a challenge that comes up while you are still brooding on your ideas. Many times, entrepreneurs don’t know what products to sell or what services to render. The fact that you have a great business idea doesn’t mean that you know the best products or services for it.
To solve this problem, you need to study the market properly before deciding on your products or services. Ask experienced individuals in your chosen niche several questions. Reach out to your target audience to know what their needs are and how best to meet them. Carrying out a detailed feasibility study helps you to handle this issue headlong and produces the best results.
Delegating Tasks
This challenge is the final one that we will deal with in this post. It is normal for entrepreneurs to handle almost every task when the business is still at the infancy stage. However, the entrepreneur should begin delegating tasks once the business begins to grow.
Why employ staff if you will be handling all the tasks by yourself? What are you paying them for? That aside, splitting your time trying to carry out several tasks takes you away from your role. You should learn to delegate tasks so that you can focus on developing ways to move the business forward.
Conclusion
There are so many challenges of entrepreneurs in Africa today. This post has shown you a few of them. What other challenges do you know? Share them with us in the comments section.
