What is Preventing Halal Entrepreneurs From Growing Their Businesses?

What is preventing halal entrepreneurs from growing their businesses in local and international markets? The reasons for their lackluster performance may be many. However, the most important among the plethora of others, are fear and ignorance about what opportunities are available out there in the industry locally and globally.

Muslim-focused or halal businesses start their businesses. They see huge potential in the market. Most of them know there are a lot of opportunities in the global halal industry. They participate in various trade shows or export-related conferences/seminars.  However, they are not proactive in finding and meeting halal business partners from other markets. In most cases, they do not even follow up with the people whom they had met in these trade shows and conferences.

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What is Preventing Halal Entrepreneurs From Growing Their Businesses?

Challenges being faced by Halal businesses

External Challenges

In principle, small halal businesses face two types of challenges as halal entrepreneurs. A major external problem these small halal businesses face is the lack of sufficient funds to grow their businesses.  The Islamic banking industry seems to have a lot of money. However, it is not reaching out to the halal entrepreneurs who actually need it to grow their businesses. Despite the free-flowing cash in the Islamic finance industry, there seems to be a disconnect between lenders and halal entrepreneurs at every level.

Internal Challenges

Most halal businesses do not have the technical know-how to improve their product offerings to make them acceptable to the international audience.

The global Muslim market for halal products and services is huge but dispersed.  The target Muslim population is 1.9 billion strong Muslims globally and is growing rapidly.  However, like any other global religion, these Muslims have different cultural backgrounds. Islam and its local and geographical cultures are intertwined in their lives.  Reaching this hugely diverse Muslim audience just by marketing and advertising may be a limiting factor as well.

It may even mean that we can not reach out to the global Muslim audience just by appealing to them in one way or the other. We will have to make some extra efforts to reach out to this target audience.

But, what are the strategies they need to adopt to grow their halal businesses locally and globally?