Keith Stride’s biggest challenges are finding new customers, maintaining work-life balance and having enough time to run his business.
In that, he is a typical small-business owner, according to a new survey that polling firm Insights West did for Small Business BC.
Those three challenges ranked atop a list of 18 obstacles that small-business owners chose as affecting them.
“It makes sense,” said Insights West president Steve Mossop. “When it comes down to it, a business doesn’t exist unless you have customers.”
Stride’s venture is Memorialpost.com – an online obituary website that charges far less than industry behemoths and is advertising-free.
Customers have started to trickle in since Stride launched the venture earlier this fall, and he has some clear strategies for how to boost awareness and snag customers.
For starters, he has bought advertising through Google’s AdWords, which requires him to pay the technology giant (Nasdaq:GOOGL) for each click-through to his website. He can also track visitors, via Google Analytics, and see how long his visitors stay on his site and what parts of the site they visit.
“It’s addictive,” he said of watching analytics tables to see how long his visitors stay on his site and what parts of it are most popular. “The next step is to convert click-through visitors into being customers.”
Basic obituaries on Memorialpost.com cost $30, which is far less than going through large daily newspapers, which tend to direct visitors to U.S.-based multinational Legacy.com.
Stride plans to launch a radio advertising campaign in November on 103.5 QM/FM. He has also started buying advertising on Twitter Inc. (Nasdaq:TWTR).
His next two challenges – achieving work-life balance and finding time to spend on his business – are likely to stay obstacles for the foreseeable future.
Stride has a full-time job as a marketer at a large Burnaby-based company and has no plans yet to give that up.
“If you combine work-life balance with finding time to work at a business, you really get what is the No. 1 challenge facing small-business owners,” Mossop said.
“There’s a joke told by those who leave jobs to start their own business. It’s, ‘I gave up my 40-hour-per-week job for the freedom of an 80-hour-per-week job.’”
One thing that sets Stride apart from many small-business owners is that he has a plan for where he is going and how he will achieve increased business.
Mossop said he was shocked that only 48% of the 459 small-business-owning survey respondents said that they had a business plan when they started their business.
“Why would you start anything new without a plan?” he asked.
“That’s probably the rallying cry that comes out of the survey: Why would you not have a plan?”
Perhaps more surprising is that when small-business owners were asked if they currently have a business plan in place, the number who said yes shrunk to 42%.
Perhaps the high number of entrepreneurs who do not have business plans stems from the fact that so many were micro-business owners: 47% of the respondents were sole practitioners or had one employee. Another 39% had between two and five employees.
Those micro-business owners likely were inspired by a “just do it” mentality and did not believe that the business was large enough to require a plan, Mossop suggested.
Only 3% of those surveyed ran businesses that had more than $1 million in annual revenue, and those business owners were most likely to have started with a business plan.
Of the survey respondents who had annual revenue above $100,000, 68% started with a business plan.
“Maybe there’s a correlation that if you have a plan, you’re more likely to be successful,” Mossop said. “That’s really the overall take-away lesson: small-business owners need to think about the why and how when they’re starting a business. That requires a plan.”
