5 Key Challenges Facing Startups in Aotearoa
Many challenges come with being a startup. You're fighting for attention in an increasingly noisy world, trying to carve out a niche in a constantly evolving industry, and often working with limited resources.
But despite these challenges, there's something undeniably exciting about being in a startup. There's something courageous about facing the challenges and pushing through to growth.
In this guide, we'll take a look at five key challenges facing New Zealand startups, so you know what you need to stand up to and be brave toward in today's modern business world.
Let's go!
1. Hiring and keeping great people💪
Hiring and retaining awesome people is one of the most challenging things for a startup. In such a competitive market, it can be pretty hard to find new team members with the skills you need who are also passionate about your product or service.
And once you've found them, it's even harder to keep them! With so many options out there, it's important to create a work environment that is inspiring, supportive, and motivating. We also think that creating a strong values alignment is pretty key to keeping people long term at your company and have noticed that companies who are walking the talk when it comes to their values are pretty attractive for people to join and then stay at.
If you’re having any issues in this area, we strongly recommend talking to your applicants and your team to get their perspectives on what is drawing them to your team and what is helping them to stay, and try to do more of that! Also listening to candidates who pulled out of the process or people who are leaving the organisation and hearing what is drawing them away is crucial information that you can then use to improve things for your people. Remember, it’s not what you say you’re about that’s important - it’s what you do that really matters when it comes to attracting and retaining incredible people!
2. Thinking global, acting local 🌏
In today's global market, it's more important than ever for startups to think about their place in the world and the impact they’re leaving behind for future generations. Thinking globally means understanding that we all have a role to play in protecting our taiao and shaping how future generations will experience the world and that the moves we make in our businesses have a ripple effect that goes much further than we can expect.
At the same time, it’s important to remember that you're acting in a local context. This means understanding the local context and environment, so that not only can your business succeed but that we are serving the needs of our communities as well. The way we act, the way we treat our staff, the ways we choose to conduct business directly impacts our local communities and how we show up for them could inspire some epic and positive change.
It's a delicate balance, but if you can get it right, you'll create an experience that everyone wants to be part of and you’ll be leaving a great legacy for those who come after us.
3. Investment in leadership development 👩💼
Another key challenge facing startups is ensuring they invest in strong, motivated leaders and help to train and develop their skills. This is vital as startups begin to scale, expand, and cement their position in their industry. With strong leadership capability, a new business is able to manage complex problems more readily, respond to needs of the team more effectively and create a strong vision for the future that will be needed as you grow.
Developing strong leadership practices needs a lot of commitment as we need to constantly develop skills and knowledge to stay ahead of the curve, but we recognise that this can be tough. Resources like time, money and attention are needed for the investment, and it may be resources you think are more important to spend elsewhere.
It’s certainly a challenge to prioritise where the spending is going, and when. In our experience, there’s no doubt investing in leadership and professional development is essential for any business to be financially successful, to be good employers and to be responsible global citizens.
4. Staying adaptable as you grow 🤸♀️
You need good leaders to help lead a startup as it grows and expands, and you need a degree of innovation to get an edge on the competition. We often see that many startsup overlook the need to maintain and tweak their existing systems while they’re on the rise which can mean we get stuck in our growth journey or that we fail to innovate enough to stay relevant.
It's not easy as startups need to find the right balance between growth and profitability. Our recommendation is to create some regular time in your schedules to review how you’re tracking and whether you need to adjust the way you’re doing things to match a new reality or whether you need to pivot something quickly to stay ahead of the curve. Those regular rhythms have been crucial for us to keep reviewing where we’re at and to make sure we’re staying adaptable in realising our vision, using new tools, tech, trends to make that come to life.
5. Burnout 🔥
Burnout is everywhere in a world that promotes grinding, productivity, and flow states, and startups are suckers for it!
Of course, it’s exciting to be part of an innovative idea, developing new services, products and tech for the future, and wanting to be a success, but it can definitely be all-consuming. With so much pressure to succeed, it's easy for everyone to become overwhelmed and eventually burnt out.
Burnout is a pretty nasty thing to experience and can lead to some serious health problems on a personal level - something we’re always keen to avoid and educate others on. If burnout happens, the emphasis should always be on how to support people to recover and you’ll notice that this can have a huge impact on your small startup and your own health.
So, putting processes and support systems in place to protect against burnout is the absolute best thing you can start with as a new company - you’ll thank yourself later for putting so much effort into this as you notice that sustainable workloads will always lead to much better outcomes for us as people and for our businesses.
When reading back over these 5 points, we realised that what we’re mostly trying to say is that everything is possible when it comes to growing your startup, whether it’s an opportunity or an obstacle, if we take time to reflect and learn along the way. Listen to your team, listen to your communities and take time to adapt to new information as it comes up.
Here’s to you and growing our new generation of startups! 🌱
