English: Speech balloons. Question and Answer. Icon for FAQ or Help. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It doesn’t matter what your background or industry is or how much experience you have in it, when you’re setting up and running a small business, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll have questions to ask.
Your questions may not be the same as some other small business owner’s, but there are very few people out there (if any at all!) who are able to go through the process of setting up their own business without asking at least a handful of questions on a regular basis.
With it sometimes easy to know who to ask, other times it can be particularly difficult and you can be left mulling over the question for days.
Therefore, if you have a question and don’t know where to turn, consider asking it to some of the below, as although you may not have considered them, they could prove to have all of the answers.
1. Friends and family
In business, a lot of the time, the answers to your questions don’t need specialist knowledge or require someone to have years of experience in the industry. This doesn’t apply to every question, but it can regularly be the case that it simply takes a fresh pair of eyes to look at the situation.
With your friends and family great people to take advice from, as they’ve always got your best interests at heart, you do need to understand they may not know the answer to your complex financial question, but they may well be able to advise on how best to deal with a troublesome customer.
2. Old colleagues
A lot of small businesses are setup by people who’ve worked in a certain industry for many years and realise they can take advantage of a certain gap in the market or offer a different – and potentially better – service than what others are doing.
If this is the case and your question is to do with the industry, it could very well be worthwhile reaching out to your network of contacts.
You may have to speak to a few different ex-colleagues before you get your answer, but it’s highly unlikely you’ll be the first person to have encountered the problem and more often than not, someone you’ve worked with in the past will have the answer you need.
3. Small business owners online
When you’re stressing over something and need some small business advice from people who’ve been in a similar situation to you, the wide variety of blogs, forums and social networks could be the way forward.
Packed full of small business owners, you might have been having sleepless nights over an issue for weeks, but it could just take a single tweet or a comment on a blog post to get a full and in-depth answer to your question.
If you’re a small business owner and have a question, no matter how big or small it may seem, it can stop you dead in your tracks if you don’t know the answer.
With there no reason why you have to remain still for anything other than a few minutes, there are plenty of people out there who are likely to have the answer and it’s simply a case of finding the right people to ask.
Small Business Help And Support 