A lot of small businesses fail a lot. On an average 50 to 70 % of small businesses fail in 18 months after the start. Starting a business might feel like dogging one disaster after another. Nobody is perfect, everyone makes mistakes. It does not matter which companies you have worked in or how many, not even the degree or experience you hold matters because you will make mistakes.
Some of the mistakes that you make will be frustrating, but this will help you learn and come back. All the mistakes you make will be a learning process as you will teach yourself how to dodge it next time. You will learn at every step while doing business. Even so, you can learn to dodge the mistakes that drown other businesses if you what they are and are not too confident about not making mistakes.
It is a challenging process to identify what causes failure, and it is even more difficult to learn how to avoid them. For example, choosing the wrong co-founder is one major problem that entrepreneurs face. When you are starting the business, the relationship you have with the partner you choose, the skills and abilities that you add to the company determines the success or failure of the business as it sets the tone of work.
New entrepreneurs lack adequate self-awareness concerning their weaknesses and strengths. This tends to make them choose the wrong partner. While choosing a partner you should select the one with complementary skills to cover up for the ones that you do not have.
Every entrepreneur has made their mistakes along the years before they achieved success. Through the mistakes, they learnt the hard way to avoid repeating them in the future and excelled to great heights. Here are the three most common mistakes that the new entrepreneurs make in their business.
1. They usually hire employees on the basis of salary rather than the experience or talent they possess:
People choose to forgo top talent to cut costs due to tight funds. Doing so will haunt you down in the future of the business. Talented people know what their value is, some may accept to work for a lower pay to join your company. But other talented people will not work for gobblers.
The biggest mistake you can do in a business is using costs to determine your hiring. People know that this is a mistake but still go forward on hiring inexperienced and unproven employees. They think that they will train them, but they do not know that this will lead to the failure of the business.
Hiring inexperienced employees while stating your business is a mistake because they will not know how to work effectively and efficiently. You will be busy training them and will lose time to spend on controlling the company. This will lead to unthought decisions and rise up of more problems.
I’m not saying that it is wrong to hire inexperienced men, but this is not the right time. When your business settles then you can hire them and get them trained as it will not affect your business as it would affect it in the beginning. So hire the talented and fit.
2. They wait too long to launch the “Perfect” product:
No product is perfect. The more you wait to launch the perfect product, the more you will get obsessed with details that do not matter to the user. First, build the product fast, then get the model out and get it tested. If you do not work fast, you will only be wasting essential time, financial resources and energy in something that is not regulated with the customer needs.
Startups often want to launch with the perfect product that will hit the market because of the product standard that people had cautioned you against. This leads to a consequent delay in the launch of the product. The delay will make the entrepreneur think if the product is perfect or not at every step.
More doubt will compel you to start again from scratch just to deliver the perfect user experience with the best technology. The time elapsed will pile up from weeks to months. When you are on the deadline to enter the market, without any product you will be forced to release the initial product. That is when you will realize and see that the product was the one you should have launched a long time ago, but just in order to make it perfect, you wasted time and resources.
The initial product will be the one to get good numbers for the company and the business will prosper. The right thing to do is to launch a successful product that is fit for the market after the tests. From there you find out about the problems and issues form the customers and develop the product accordingly. The product is for the people and not for you unless you release it you will not know what are the other aspects.
3. Due to overconfidence, they fail to create and listen to an effective group of support:
Every businessman needs someone to have his back. When businesses are started, they often have a team of advisors. But due to the daily operations of the business, the businessmen often tend to keep pushing them away, not attending meetings and ignoring the advice.
This results in traffic strategic mistakes that the advisors could have helped the company dodge easily with their problem-solving capacity. You as the owner should listen to them as they are a crucial part of the business.
Some businessmen just dodge the fact that they need one and fail to make it. This is because they fail to accept that they do not know everything and also fail to understand that to grow you have to accept that you do not know everything. You have to surround yourself with people who cover up for the areas in which you lack experience and knowledge. This will help you to reduce your mistakes to the minimum.
Starting a business is a risk in itself and business is full of risks. As the owner, you might not be able to control the external factors that affect your business such as economic fluctuations in the markets. But the one thing you can control is how you choose to react to your problems and mistakes.
By controlling with the help of your advisors you can minimize the risks of mistakes. But not all mistakes can be avoided, it is inevitable for other mistakes to occur. Do not let this mistake define your companies capability and ruin your business. Deal with it in a proper manner and learn from your mistakes. Acknowledge what was the problem, learn and correct yourself in those areas and move on. This will help you grow as an entrepreneur.
Conclusion
Learn from yours as well as others mistakes as this will help you to evolve. Do not ignore factors that will help you in the long run as they are the ones that will define your success or failure. By following these tips and avoiding the mistakes, you would reach success sooner than you imagined.
