5 Challenges of Passive Income Businesses & How to Overcome Them
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Passive income businesses promise the freedom and flexibility to work on your own schedule.
For many, the goal is to put these businesses on autopilot to make them truly hands-off and cut back on the amount of time spent actually working in the business.
And while striving for a business that practically runs itself is admirable, it isn’t without challenges.
Here are five key ways your passive income business may suffer – and what you can do to prevent it from toppling your empire!
Contents
Managing Competition
When you launched your passive income business, chances are you spent hours researching the market to find a niche, product, or service that your audience truly needed.
Forbes cites this as perhaps the biggest challenge for passive-income entrepreneurs: once you put the business on autopilot, you lose your competitive edge because research falls by the wayside.
The result is a business that stagnates or loses ground in a competitive market.
Fortunately, the solution is relatively simple, even though it may not be easy.
Instead of kicking back and putting your feet up, you need to stay in the game.
Research the next advancement in your niche and start making plans to launch something new for your loyal followers.
No One-Size-Fits-All Approaches
Take a quick look on Google; you will almost certainly find blogs and news articles promising a step-by-step formula to make money while you sleep.
And while a lot of these articles have great information and good intentions, there’s one major problem.
If everyone follows the same steps and creates something similar, is there still a market for you?
Instead, you should think about what sets your business apart from everyone else.
Blending in with the crowd is never a good thing when it comes to business strategy. In other words, you must learn how to pivot to succeed economically in your passive income business.
No matter what you sell or promote, you have to learn to be nimble and flexible.
You can’t do that if your business is completely on autopilot, so be warned that you might miss the prime opportunity to pivot if you step too far back from your business's day-to-day.
Pivoting should be a last resort, but it’s a chance you don’t want to miss if the opportunity arises.
Narrow Focus
You found the perfect idea for your passive income business. Whether it’s an e-book, a t-shirt with a print-on-demand company, or the most convenient dog water bowl for traveling, you think you have hit metaphorical gold with your idea.
Many entrepreneurs who want a passive income stream go all in on their very first idea, spending all of their startup capital on inventory, design, or other investments.
The problem is that most business owners won’t experience massive success from a single passive income stream.
As with investing, you should attempt to diversify your portfolio. Entrepreneur Jen Glantz shares that most six-figure business owners have more than five streams of income.
Start with one passive income stream and use the revenue it generates to fund your next idea. Roll the income from those two businesses into a third, and so on.
When one fails – and it feels almost inevitable that not all of your ideas will be successful – you have something to fall back on in the form of another revenue stream.
No Reinvestment
Even once you have multiple income streams set up for your passive income business, you should never stop attempting to grow.
Many business owners get so excited to have the first $1,000 roll into their bank account that they splurge it all as soon as it arrives.
This is the wrong move if you want your business to keep growing.
Even passive income streams will require you to reinvest a portion of your proceeds.
It's recommended that you invest roughly 20 to 30 percent of your profits right back into your business to foster sustained growth.
Set aside a little something to reward yourself and celebrate your hard work.
Then, let that money get back to work for you.
Neglecting the Figures
Passive income is great because it brings money into your bank account while you literally sleep.
The reason you wanted to pursue passive income is probably because it allowed you to live your life on your own terms.
But bee prepared to learn the hard way that passive income isn’t as hands-off as you might want it to be, at least not if you want to truly succeed.
As mentioned above, you need to keep your finger on the pulse of what is going on behind the scenes.
Instead of just rejoicing that another deposit was made to your account, make sure you keep tabs on important metrics like the cost of goods sold (depending on your business), the amount you’re spending on marketing, and even sales figures like the average cart value.
If you don’t monitor your spending and income, you will eventually come across a situation that gobbles up your profits. Maybe the cost of the item you sell has increased, but your price hasn’t.
Maybe your marketing budget is out of control, given the small volume of sales.
Whatever it is, it will catch up to you eventually if you don’t actively keep up with your metrics.
Final Thoughts: The Challenges of Passive Income Businesses
The good news is that passive income businesses still hold a lot of promise, even if and when you encounter some of these challenges.
There is nothing so serious that you can’t overcome it with a little planning and preparation.
If you’ve been thinking about starting a business that runs itself, make sure you’re putting these tips to good use to keep making money well into the future.
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