It’s often difficult for entrepreneurs to start a business without making too many mistakes. And many people make mistakes when we’re faced with a new state of affairs and the trick is to know beforehand and to learn from your mistakes. The truth is, there are mistakes that even CEOs and experienced businessmen make, and whether you are aware of them or not, it is always a good idea to check and play it safe.
Now, here we have listed some of the prime mistakes that can cost you, your business and even slow down your rate of growth. And yes, the first mistake you can make is not admitting you make mistakes. If you remain stubborn, you run the risk of accentuating your mistake, and that means, you’d keep building on your misfortune and the mistake would get bigger and bigger, and you’d lose more money. So try to evaluate your decisions and choices soon, and to avoid some mistakes in the future, ask yourself good questions. When you make mistakes you need to just admit it, re-evaluate the situation and make sure you don’t do any more damage. And if you’ve gone far beyond repair and all your money is lost, don’t worry. There are always two sides to the coin. You can start all over again, aware of your previous mistakes. And if you can’t invest anymore then just walk away and change your course. Just don’t throw more good money into bad choices.
And you would need to know the mistake was a mistake in the first place, and you need to be aware of those choices. Now, here are some of those mistakes that you can make -
Big Customer Syndrome and Insufficient Capital
If most of your revenues come from one big customer you are walking a tightrope. If you keep making concessions and special investments for them just to keep their business, you’d be too busy to develop further customers and revenue flows. You’d be increasingly dependant on that one big customer, and what happens when that customer just goes away? The rope would break, and you’d fall flat. You need to know that you have to deal with them for good revenue, along with a small number of other customers, and diversify your revenue sources, so even if you lose one big customer, you still have a lot to hold onto.
Quite a few businesses don’t have enough capital. Even some mature companies often lack the cash reserves to deal with rainy days. You need to make sure that you have enough capital to make it through the sales cycle. Or have enough capital for the next intended round of financial support, and you need to lower your burn rate to make sure that you do. You need to keep a check on your business assumptions. The norm is low expense forecasts, unrealistic sales projections, and tight product development timeframes.
Developing Products In A Vacuum
Now you may have a great idea for a product and may have spent years implementing that idea. But when you introduce it into the market, it fails miserably. This happens as you made the product for yourself, rather than trying to find out what the market needed. You need to live in society to understand what works in there, and making up products in a vacuum is alienating.
You should do all the necessary market research and testing for your product. You need to find out whether customers even want to buy your product. If you get good feedback, go ahead with your idea. You can fund your product and sell the product at pre-release prices. And if no one wants what you wish to sell, go onto your next idea.
Quite a few entrepreneurs believe that they can offer lower prices and earn huge profits on volume. What does the market want? Cheaper would be better? Or would you work for low wages and sell your product at low prices? Well, gross margins pay for things like marketing and product development but low margins don’t offer you much profit and therefore, no growth rate.
Your prices need to be as high as your market can bear it. Don’t overprice, just choose the right price. Take all your incremental costs into account, and put a little room in for profit. Keep raising your prices until your customers stop buying, as now you’ve gone too far. If you sell more units, you produce a greater dollar volume at the higher price than at a lower price. For service companies, low prices never work.
Equal Partnerships
Not everybody is a person for all seasons and not everyone is a one-person army. Sometimes you may lack certain skills that someone else may be better at. You may be great with ideas and plans but you may lack people skills or the capital. You may be a good salesman, but you may still need someone to deal with all the operations at the office. Or you simply started your business with a friend. In whatever situation, you become a part of a partnership, and you split the company into half. It seems fair and just, but as every relationship, there are complications eventually.
Either party can stall the decision-making processes of your company, and with both of you in a 50-50 power-holding stake, you will hit a stalemate. And with more partners, yes, too many cooks with spoil the broth. Everyone would have an equal vote (or they wouldn’t be there) and decisions would be made by consensus, no one would have the final say, and every little decision will turn into a debate, and the time to make the right decision would just slip away.
But someone has to be in charge to make the right decisions and you can make that person a CEO and give them the largest ownership stake. 51/49 would work better than 50/50. And if you and your partner still need to have total equality, you can give a one percent share to an outside advisor who needs to be the right candidate to work as a tiebreaker between the two of you.
Out of Focus
If you don’t have the time or the manpower to pursue every interesting opportunity, then don’t. But many entrepreneurs desire to seize every opportunity instead of focusing on their core product, service, market, distribution channel, and end up spreading themselves too thin and it results in sub-par performances. You need to concentrate your attention in a limited area that can lead to good results, and that always surpasses the profits generated from diversification. There are many opportunities and you need to pick the right one for you and those are the ones, that you can do, which provide superior returns.
For more information on this subject, you can get a book called Focus by Al Reis.
First Class and Infrastructure Crazy
Many new endeavors die from excessive overhead and vast ambitions. If you put too much money into it without know where it is coming from, you are heading for disaster. Image is important to certain limits and when you first start off, you should keep your infrastructure humble and your furniture cheap. Your team should be compensated when the profits roll in and not before. Many good entrepreneurs know how to use their cash and use it for key business-building processes like product research & development, sales and marketing, and not for other things that don’t entirely contribute to sales and profit. You just have to ask yourself; will there be a sufficient return on this expenditure? Spending money on unnecessary items would be a waste.
Perfection-itis
This is a condition that is commonly seen in engineers, who don’t always feel comfortable releasing their products until they are absolutely perfect. While their concerns are ethical there is still an 80/20 rule. If you follow this rule, finishing the last 20 percent of the product could cost you more than ‘what you spent on the rest. Perfection is unachievable most of the time, and it can be very, very costly and time-consuming. And while you are trying to get it right, the market changes or your customers could change their minds about purchasing your existing products and decide to wait for what’s next. To avoid this, you need to focus on creating a product within an allotted time so that you can beat the market. Set a deadline for the product development team to match so you can know when you have to stop development and start making deliveries. Let your engineers know, that they have a time frame for all their concerns. And yes, give them time. Goes without saying that you don’t release sub-standard and dangerous products.
Doubtful Returns On Investment
Do you know what the returns are, from selling your products or from service you have rendered? How much additional business did you generate for your customers? How much money did they save? Well, numbers do all the talking and you have to do the analysis. Go ahead and talk to your customers, and create case studies. Create concrete reasons to calculate the benefits that justify the purchases. You can’t expect your customer would know and if you can demonstrate a huge return on investment your product provides, welcome to the big league.