How to Solve Business Problems When You’re Not Sure Where to Start

Business is all about solving problems. You solve your customer’s problems and they compensate you; you solve your business problems and you become more efficient and profitable. But solving problems isn’t always easy – if it were, everyone would be doing it! 

So how do you solve a business problem when you aren’t sure where to start?

Consult an Expert

Just because you are an entrepreneur, doesn’t mean that you have to have all the answers. In fact, admitting that you don’t have all the answers is what will make you a great business leader. The whole point of running a business is that you specialize in a particular service or product so you shouldn’t expect yourself to be able to do everything.

Let’s take SEO as an example. All businesses rely on SEO practices to boost their sites up the rankings with the hopes of gaining more customers. This is a basic part of business but when you’re busy having great ideas for new services or products, you can’t be expected to be monitoring all the metrics on Google Analytics. 

Bringing in an expert or outsourcing services is often a good way to get around this. For example, Brad Russell could advise you on what you need to do and then you could either leave your SEO in his capable hands or take some of the work on yourself, if you aren’t too busy. You can’t do everything and you can’t know everything but it is all out there to be learnt.

Go Back to Basics

Sometimes a solution isn’t obvious because, in pursuit of the unique, you are forgetting the basics. It’s easy to over complicate things when faced with a complicated problem. However, if you take the time to break the problem down into smaller parts, you might find more obvious solutions present themselves.

Going back to basics is one of the best strategies for problem solving at work because it allows you to reframe the issue. So, let’s say that you want to gain more customers. If you break that down into smaller parts, what you need is a strategy to encourage more customers to visit your site and then a further strategy to encourage them to convert. 

If you can break a bigger problem into smaller parts, you might find that you already have a few solutions on hand. So, if you already know how to make a particular part of a process more efficient, this could contribute to an overall problem with time management, for example. 

Ask a Different Question 

Obsessing over a problem isn’t a particularly healthy thing to do, especially if you keep asking the same questions over and again. Instead, you need to explore every angle and come at the problem in different ways. Obsessing might keep you focused but if you don’t start asking different questions, you’re not going to make any progress. 

Smarter questions don’t take anything for granted. Asking what you want to achieve is often a good way to get to the crux of a problem because it allows you to step out of context, which may be holding you back. Pursuing different questions and following them up will also allow you to be more critical of the ideas you come up with. ‘Why?’ might be one of the most annoying questions a child can ask but it is also one of the best ways to probe your problem and figure out what needs to be done. 

Put Your Heads Together

If you have employees, solving problems should always be a team effort. A diverse team can offer a wide variety of perspectives, potentially leading to a broader range of solutions you can refine together. To conduct a problem solving meeting, it’s important that everyone has a voice and there are no bad ideas. 

A good way to encourage and build on ideas is to use the phrase ‘yes and’. This will empower people to speak up and add to the conversation. It can feel a little tedious though, so if you find yourselves discussing something particularly interesting, it’s okay to drop it! Just use your judgement. 

Solving business problems is part and parcel of being an entrepreneur but it’s important to remember that you aren’t alone. If you are struggling with a problem, turning to the people around you or seeking advice from an expert is a very good idea. You don’t have to know everything before you start out but if you are willing to learn and experiment, you’ll go far.

This is a contributed post.