Striking Up

The 5 Mistakes People Make When Starting A Business And The 5 Semi-Mistakes

Posted on November 8, 2008 with 12 Comments

Here’s Striking Up’s 5 mistakes and 5 semi-mistakes of starting a business!

Mistakes

1. Not enough money

It’s so common to see entrepreneurs or business owners run out of money. That’s why their new businesses shut down and fails. You need to have enough cash coming in so you gain a profit.  Money is king during a business startup and you need to have a fail proof plan for it.

The key here is to plan well. Without a good plan, you’re destined to fail.

2. Not finding enough customers

Not putting your eggs in one basket and finding more customers is critical to a success of a business. More customers = More money. If you solely depend on a customer, they can be the deciding point for your business. If they hit a crisis and fall, so will you.

Try cold calling potential customers and see if they are interested in buying from you. You can offer special under-the-table rates to them as an incentive for them to continue on buying from you.

3. Not thinking survival

Starting a business is about survival. You have to try to live another day because every day, businesses close and if you survive and they close, then you beat them. Your goal is to try to survive as long as possible until you reach a point where you don’t need to depend on survival. You have a huge amount of cash coming in that your goal is something else.

Do anything to try and survive. This may not be what you want to do but it’s only until you are able to support yourself.

4. Losing momentum and the ambition

New entrepreneurs have goals to start a business and be successful so they work a lot and work really hard the first few weeks or months but once they start sinking into reality, it doesn’t seem everything is like what they planned so they go a bit slower and this eventually kills the company.

It takes a lot of time to develop and nourish a new company. It might seem like forever but never lose the momentum and set goals that never get boring. If you can’t, being an entrepreneur and starting a business is not for you.

5. Don’t have enough experience

Sometimes you just aren’t ready to start a new company. You have to access yourself and see whether or not you are capable of starting a business by yourself. It’s not an easy task, it requires great discipline and if you can’t be disciplined enough to focus on what you are doing, you shouldn’t even start. Nothing anyone can do will help change that.

To help reinforce and get more experience is to find out what other businesses have done to achieve success and implement those strategies into your own company. Chat and try to find as much new people that are willing to help you as you can. This can be a huge asset later down in the road. You ask people about the area when you travel to a new area when you are travelling; so why don’t you ask a few knowledgeable people about business when you are starting a new company?

Semi-Mistakes (Might not be mistakes depending on how you do.)

1. Doing it all alone.

I’ve known and seen entrepreneurs start everything in a whole company by themselves and only share a tiny bit of responsibility with someone they hire because they can’t afford to trust their company under someone else’s hands. They need to be in control all the time. They have the experience, the knowledge and practically most if not all the skills to run the company.

This has it’s downsides as well, if you think you are too good for yourself, you’ll be destined to fail because you really aren’t that good. Also, you might be forcing yourself to do things that you truly don’t enjoy and never will be good at. Knowing where you stand, what you are and what value you can offer, you can be a very lethal business owner that can reach success. Maybe you do need to hire someone, and need assistance on a few things on the way. There is only so much time in a single day and not having someone to take the load off you might hurt you in the long run.

2. Not hiring right away.

Hiring is really a controversial topic. You need to give your employees, salary; benefits and many other incentives which might kill your company but sometimes you just need to hire someone to take the load off you. You should begin looking at who can be brought on board to help you on the weaker spots in your company.

How can you hire someone for less? You can try to find family members, maybe they need a job and are willing to work for a less pay for a family member. There are also internships you can look to recruit for some simpler tasks and they don’t cost much also.

3. Building around a customer.

Trusting the customer too much and building your company around them isn’t a good idea. They have the ability to ruin you then. They might suddenly ask you for things your company can’t supply and will hurt you. Most business owners think “if I build it, they will come” only to realize that they’ve built it and nobody is coming. If you are building something blindly, then you are 100% going to fail. This is without a doubt.  You have to find a customer who has a problem and a need and is willing to pay you to solve it and you go and solve it with a solution. An example is restaurants and law firms. Restaurant menus are decided by the owner’s personality and preference and they go make it hoping that people will like them but everybody can do the same thing while law firms provide something we occasionally have a problem with and not all of can do so we require a solution and go to them.

Talk to potential customers, see what they are interested in, identify who has money and what their pains are and then create your product / service around them.

4. Doing it just for the money.

If you really don’t like what you do, then don’t do it! You will guarantee to not be successful. All the successful entrepreneurs and business owners love their job and what they are doing and much less of what their salary is.

Money is important because most companies are for-profit corporations, but it will often take a long time for you to start earning some big money and if you don’t truly enjoy your work then you won’t be able to convince yourself to keep going and will eventually give up. You can only do something that you don’t really love because it convinces you to keep doing it.

5. Survive for at least 3 years

There is a huge myth about surviving the first 3 years of a company. After the first 3 years of a company, it’s supposedly supposed to be a lot easier.

The first year should be the hardest; you start from scratch with nothing and have to build everything from scratch. You have to advertise, find customers, sell, take profits in and re-do it over and over. The second year should be a bit simpler but more tedious since you have some kind of foundation and you can build off it but money still isn’t coming in like you imagined and you have worked hard for a whole year. The only thing you can do is keep at it and hopefully everything you want will come.

Related posts:

1. Top 5 Secrets Of Outrageously Successful Business Owners And Top 5 Semi-Mistakes From Highly Unsuccessful Business People Here is St
2. Run Your Business With A System Asus is th
3. Why Developing Passive Income is Important What is pa
4. Repairing An Unhealthy Business Have you j
5. Why Do Your Clients Hire You? Why do you