5 Tips For Women Entrepreneurs In Their 20s

Your 20s can be both thrilling and overwhelming. On one hand, you will be stepping out of your comfort zone, wanting to start a career and take the usual risks. On the other hand, you are traversing office politics and punching in the hours to get the paycheck to fulfill your financial needs. 

You might be thinking about what you should do now to get ready for the future. Being an entrepreneur can be exciting and rewarding in the long run, but it can also feel like a big challenge. Some challenges include testing your idea, managing financial resources, building a team, and incorporating technology. 

The 5 Tips to Succeed as a Women Entrepreneur in 2024

You will be pleasantly surprised to know that almost all the business giants today had humble beginnings. Many even started their projects and businesses in their 20s. These people dropped out of college, spent hours tied down to their workstations, quit jobs to take risks, and were determined to make their ideas count. 

You might feel unsure about how big your dream or idea can grow, just like others have felt. To clear the air, here are the 5 Tips that will help you achieve your entrepreneurial dream and success.

1. Prioritize Time Management 

Starting a business from scratch, and that too in your 20s, can be an overwhelming and emotionally taxing experience. As a young entrepreneur, you’ll need to learn how to manage your time effectively to be productive and avoid burnout. 

Running a new business requires you to wear so many hats that you can easily lose focus on important matters. That is why you must plan for every move and visualize the outcomes. 

First, you have to develop your craft and ensure it will succeed. But be aware that success looks different for everyone. Famous motivational author Malcolm Gladwell writes in The Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours to become world-class in any field. You need to make every minute count when you are looking to:

• Develop superior products or services
• Plan marketing campaigns
• Ensure that the team provides creative inputs and enhances productivity 
• Deliver value to potential customers or clients

This practice will help you master your skills and focus on your business strengths. However, you can easily end up working in your business rather than your business. 

Consider using a time-management app to build your schedule and prioritize your tasks. You can use ClickUp, which is an all-in-one app for task management. It has a built-in tracker that helps to keep track of each task. The app allows you to automate processes and help the teams brainstorm, plan, and manage everything from design to documents.  

With customizable options, ClickUp helps you accomplish more in less time and saves time, energy, and money.

2. Take Calculated Risks 

The exuberance of youth helps take risks and explore unchartered territory. However, there are times when you have to tread carefully. 

Taking risks in a startup business is like playing poker; with luck, you can draw a strong hand and land a royal flush. However, sometimes you can also land with only one pair or two pairs.

Here is what you need to do for taking calculated risks

• Define your goals: Establishing the business’s objectives and outcomes helps determine potential risks. You must define the revenue or financial goals, market share plans, and long-term growth targets. 
• Understand the risks: Running a business involves juggling multiple risks simultaneously. These include market risk, financial risk, operational risk, and legal risk. You must perform a risk analysis to assess the risk and then make a pertinent strategy. 
• Make informed decisions: Gathering and analyzing data considerably reduces the negative outcome of taking risks. This data can be obtained through market research, customer surveys, and financial analysis. 
• Develop a plan: Outline the steps to achieve goals and plan to mitigate risks. This can be done by making a detailed operational or marketing plan. 
• Take action:  Once you have conducted the research, analyzed the risks, and planned your goals, it’s time to take action. Regularly analyze the outcome and adjust as needed.

Technology is your best friend here as well. Customizable software such as Infinity can help identify potential risks over time. The app has views such as Charts, Lists, Tables, Calendars, and Gantt charts, which allow you to multitask efficiently. It also has a drag-and-drop feature, so you can easily impart and export data and integrate it with apps such as Trello and Zapier.

Infinity offers pre-made templates for particular functions of the business, which you can use to assign tasks to the team. Use activity and progress tracking to determine whether the task gathers information or analyzes potential threats. 

3. Track Your Employee’s Progress 

Employees are and will remain an integral part of your business. Their strengths, skills, determination, and productivity are critical for the success of a startup project. 

To ensure your business is on track towards the targets, you need to monitor employee progress. Success comes not only from tracking the financial, production, and sales data but also from analyzing employee activities. It comes by knowing how productive employees are during their working hours. 

However, merely focusing on performance measures without accountability in tasks can impact the business in the bigger picture. 

Without any pertinent tool, there is no way of knowing how employees spend their time and use technology. What may seem like a fleeting conversation can be an employee leaking company data – you never know!

If you are a conscientious employer, the XNSPY employee monitoring app helps reduce office distractions and prevent data misuse. It has different tools that will tell you how your teams use their office hours. The features that help are:

• Email monitoring: XNSPY lets you read all the sent and received emails. You can check the sender’s email address and even watchlist emails and certain words. 
• IM chat monitoring: With XNSPY, you can access all chats on different IM apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, and many others. It can also access all the exchanged media on these apps.
• Call recording: You can remotely record all calls made on company-provided phones to listen to interactions. This will help to prevent any employee blackmail and abuse. 

4. Calculate Costs and Keep Your Books 

In all the hustle and bustle, not focusing on accurate bookkeeping in the initial stages can cause considerable problems. 

You will lack clear visibility into the startup’s financial health. This can lead to poor accounting decisions that can further result in difficulty managing expenses, compliance issues, and loss of investor confidence. 

Startup founders usually have limited budgets and want to make the most out of available funds. Bookkeeping makes it easy to track daily cash flows, manage payment deadlines, and make all the decisions to maximize revenue. 

Financial decisions are something you cannot do alone. You need facts and figures that come from the books. It gives you access to financial statements and reports on expenditure, KPIs, loss, and profitability. Bookkeeping also ensures a smooth tax filing process and easy retrieval of crucial data to fulfill compliance requirements.

FreshBooks is a cloud-based app purposefully designed for entrepreneurs to manage their books. The app makes it much easier to send invoices, check the status of payments, and respond to clients’ feedback. 

FreshBooks has a smart dashboard that allows you to track everything from cash flow, expenses, time, projects, and proposals. The report section provides all relevant information on tax summaries, profit and loss, and expenses. The project section is one platform where you and your team can share files and get timely updates.  

5.  Delegate Effectively 

Establishing your business from scratch means you are responsible for all the big and small tasks. This makes the role of the entrepreneur more rewarding and gives a sense of satisfaction. However, in the long run, it can be quite exhausting. 

Delegation is all about assigning workload to skillful employees to maximize productivity. The biggest advantage is freeing up your time so you can focus on all the other crucial aspects of your business. Other advantages include building a formidable team, instilling trust and confidence in the employees, and preventing bottlenecks from scaling your business. 

The first step is determining what needs to be delegated and why. The second step is ensuring the team members have the tools and skills to optimize the work. If the employees lack these tools and skills, it means more work for you. The third step is keeping the team members motivated and making them understand the reasons for accomplishing the said tasks. 

Trello is one of the most popular tools for delegating tasks and getting prompt updates. The interface includes a board and card system that provides a more visual approach to managing daily tasks and projects. You can easily move tasks from one column to the next, from ‘To Do’ to ‘Progress’ and then’ Completed. ‘ It is easy to delegate tasks by dragging a card to a team member’s column. The app also allows synching and integrations with other tools. 

Conclusion

While your parents had to work their way up the corporate ladder, being a Gen Z kid gives you the opportunity to start your business even in your 20s. However, amid increasing competition, you must handle financial management, delegation, and employee monitoring to ensure your business consistently strives for success.

While taking care of these factors can surely be an entire job on its own, modern tools allow you to handle everything effectively and keep your entrepreneurial dreams alive.

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