Last updated on July 14th, 2025 at 06:36 am
Running a business will always involve uncertainties. The key isn’t to eliminate risks (that’s impossible), but to build systems that help you navigate them.
In this guide, we’ll share five practical ways to navigate risks that you might face as a new entrepreneur. It’ll help you build a sustainable business and not flame out in your first year.
Validate With MVPs Before Scaling Anything
Every new business idea carries the risk of market rejection — building something that customers simply don’t want or need.
This is where the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in.
What is an MVP?
An MVP is the simplest version of your product that can solve the core problem you’re targeting.
For instance, if you want to create a sophisticated personal finance app, you might start by helping a small group of people manage their budgets using simple spreadsheets first.
For example, Buffer, now a popular social media management platform, didn’t launch with all its current features. It started with just a landing page to test if people wanted to schedule tweets. When that proved successful, the founders built the simplest possible version — a basic tool that could only schedule tweets, with no analytics or multi-account support.
Only after users started paying for this basic version did Buffer gradually expand its features based on real customer needs.
It’s easy to get excited and build lots of fancy features that seem cool, by starting small with an MVP, you avoid the risk of burning money on features nobody wants.
How to Build an MVP
To build an MVP, start by asking yourself – “What’s the most basic version of my solution that can solve the core problem?”
Most entrepreneurs make the mistake of asking users what features they want. Instead, you have to deeply understand their problems.
What frustrates them? How often do they face this issue? Are they actively looking for solutions? Let their problems guide your MVP, not their feature requests.
Instead of trying to solve everyone’s problems, pick a specific segment.
For example, only serving plumbers if you’re building a service marketplace, or only handling lunch deliveries in one neighborhood for your food delivery service. This helps you learn deeply about a specific group rather than understanding many users superficially.
Launch something quickly that you might even feel slightly embarrassed about – as Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, famously said –
This doesn’t mean launching something bad or broken, but rather something simple and focused that solves the core problem well.
Always Have Multiple Customer Acquisition Channels
When businesses depend solely on one channel, they become vulnerable to factors they can’t control.
For instance, if you rely entirely on Google Ads and suddenly your account gets banned or there’s a technical glitch you’ll lose predictable income. It’ll impact your ability to pay business expenses while you scramble to find a new channel.
That’s why you need multiple sources to get leads that can later become your customers.
For example, at ClickFunnels, we use blog posts and search engine optimization (SEO) to help new entrepreneurs discover us when they’re looking for business growth solutions.
We also have an Instagram account. It brings in engaged businesses who love following along with tips and event updates.
We also invest in Google and Facebook ads to reach people actively looking for marketing solutions. These paid campaigns help us scale quickly when we need more customers, plus they let us test different messages to see what really clicks with our audience.
The advantage is that if any single channel slows down or has issues, our business keeps growing through the others.
The key is to identify channels that align with your target audience’s behavior.
Here are some examples of channels that can work best for different types of businesses:
| Business Type | Best Channel Mix |
|---|---|
| Local Restaurant |
|
| Online Fitness Coach |
|
| B2B Software Company |
|
| Handmade Jewelry Business |
|
| Professional Services (Like Accounting) |
|
One of the most effective customer acquisition channels that works for almost all types of businesses is email marketing. If you haven’t built an email list yet, start now.
With tools like ClickFunnels, you can quickly set up landing pages and email automation without dealing with technical complexities.
The platform handles everything from opt-in forms to automated email sequences, making it easy to capture and nurture leads. You can then turn them into customers with engaging sales emails, or newsletters.
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Secure Legal Foundations Before the Operational Launch
Fixing legal problems is always more expensive than preventing them.
So don’t wait for problems to arise & get your legal paperwork in order – whether you’re running a small cafe or launching an online business.
Here are the things you should take care of:
- Proper business structure (LLC, Corporation, etc.): This single decision affects your personal liability, taxes, and even how you can raise money later. Talk to both a tax advisor and a lawyer before deciding.
- Protecting your IP (Intellectual Property): Think of your business name, logo, unique processes, or inventions. Get trademarks and copyrights so you can stop others from copying what makes your business special.
- Employee and contractor agreements: Clear contracts with workers prevent messy disputes about pay, roles, and confidentiality. They also protect your business secrets from walking out the door when someone leaves your company.
- Terms of service and privacy policies: These are your rules of doing business – how you’ll deliver services, handle complaints, and limit your liability. Privacy policies explain how you’ll protect customer data, which is crucial in today’s digital world.
- Industry-specific licenses and permits: Find out what licenses you need and when you have to renew them. Health permits, professional certifications, local business licenses – getting caught without one can shut you down fast.
If you get overwhelmed by legal jargon, take the help of an attorney who specializes in small businesses or startups in your industry. They’ll spot issues you haven’t even considered. For instance, many e-commerce owners don’t realize they need specific policies for handling customer data across different states or countries until they talk to a legal counsel.
Track Key Business Metrics Regularly
When you’re just starting your business, it’s easy to focus only on profits. You see money coming in and think everything is fine. But looking at just profits is like looking at just one piece of a puzzle. It doesn’t show you the whole picture.
You need to track multiple business metrics.
What is a Business Metric?
A business metric is a number that shows how well a specific part of your business is performing. For example, 20% revenue growth is a metric.
Some essential metrics that most new businesses should monitor include:
- Cash runway (how long your money will last)
- Customer acquisition cost (what you spend to get each new customer)
- Gross margins (what you keep from each sale after direct costs)
These metrics are universal, regardless of the type of business.
Others are more specific to the type of business.
For example, if you run a service business, like consulting or an agency, watching how many clients stay with you is critical – because it’s much harder and expensive to find new clients than keep existing ones.
On the other hand, if you sell products, you need to carefully track how quickly your inventory sells. Having too much unsold inventory means your money is stuck in products sitting on shelves instead of being used to grow your business.
If you use ClickFunnels, you get a comprehensive analytics dashboard that helps you monitor sales performance, page views, and conversion metrics from a centralized dashboard.
You can also analyze metrics by funnel, product, or landing page, with the ability to view daily or weekly trends. This means you can spot problems early, optimize what’s working, and quickly pivot marketing strategies that aren’t performing well.
Having all your metrics in one place also saves hours of time you’d otherwise spend gathering data from multiple sources, letting you focus on growing your business instead of drowning in spreadsheets.
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How Often Should You Track Your Metrics?
Make it a habit to look at your most important numbers at regular intervals.
- Check your cash and daily sales every day
- Your customer numbers should be reviewed weekly
- Do a deeper review of all your key metrics at the end of each month
The earlier you spot a problem, the easier and cheaper it is to fix.
What makes this work is having trigger points – look at specific numbers and decide when to act. For example, if your cash drops below two months of expenses, that’s your trigger to focus on collections or cut non-essential spending. Or if your customer acquisition cost goes up by 20%, that’s your signal to review your marketing strategy.
Set Up Quality Control Checkpoints Before Delivery
One of the biggest and almost irreversible risks for new businesses is losing reputation through inconsistent quality. Your reputation is fragile in the early days, and a single quality slip-up can result in negative reviews that haunt your business for months or even years.
Here are a few ideas on how to implement quality checks:
Create a Pre-Delivery Checklist for Every Product or Service
Break down your delivery process into specific checkpoints where quality can be verified.
Let’s take our own content creation process as an example.
For each article we publish, we follow a comprehensive proofreading checklist that covers everything from basic spelling and grammar to more complex elements like sentence structure, vocabulary usage, and proper citations. This systematic approach ensures that every piece of content we deliver meets high-quality standards and provides real value to our readers.
You can create similar checklists for your business. Start with the major categories that matter most for your service or product. For example, if you’re running a web design business, your checkpoints might include testing on multiple browsers, checking all links, and having a second pair of eyes review the final design.
Along with the checklist, it’s also important to write down what “good” looks like for your business.
If you’re running a food truck, document exact recipes, portion sizes, and plating standards with photos. For a landscaping business, take pictures of properly completed work for different services (lawn mowing patterns, hedge trimming heights, edging standards). When issues occur (and they will), having these documented processes helps identify where things went wrong.
Build in Buffer Time for Quality Checks
Always add extra time to your delivery schedules for quality control.
For example, if you think it’ll typically take 4 weeks to launch your coaching program, schedule 4.5 weeks to allow proper testing. This buffer helps maintain quality even when unexpected issues arise.
Rushing through quality checks to meet tight deadlines often leads to mistakes that could damage your reputation. So it’s better to delay or under-promise (and over-deliver) than to rush and deliver subpar work.
Final Thoughts
There’s no denying the fact that starting a business involves risks. And while many aspiring entrepreneurs get paralyzed by what could go wrong, successful business owners focus on what they can control and plan for what they can’t.
Focus on building robust systems that help you identify potential issues early, respond effectively when problems arise, and keep your business stable even when facing unexpected challenges. This practical, systematic approach to handling business risks will serve you far better than hoping for the best or trying to avoid risks altogether.