02/05/2016
TOP MISTAKES YOU MUST AVOID WHEN STARTING A BUSINESS
Happy worker's day to you all, I want to share a very crucial secret with entrepreneurs today, Please feel free to ask questions.
Statistics have shown globally that out of every 10 business started in a given year 6 fell before their 1st anniversary.
Thank GOD for BBS NIGERIA 🙌🙌🙌
What are the common mistakes that new business owners make and how can you avoid making them yourself?
Here is our top 10 list of mistakes people make when starting a business:
1) Not Enough Money
The most common reason why new businesses shut down is that the owner runs out of money. Cash flow is critical to a startup business. You could be profitable and still have to close your doors because your customers are taking too long to pay you. Cash is king in a startup venture and you need to prepare for it.
One option is to make sure you have enough startup capital from your own investments or outsiders (bank loan, private investors, etc). A second option is to ease into the business so that you start asking customers to pay you a percentage of the money upfront. You could also do the business on a part-time basis until you know that it will make enough money to support you.
2) Not Thinking Survival
Starting a business is all about survival. How do you stay around one more day so that you can learn more about your market and close new customers?
At the beginning stages of a business this may mean doing work that might not be completely what you want to do but it helps pay the bills. You need to do whatever it takes to survive and get through until the business can fully support yourself.
3) Losing Speed
Many new business owners have ambitions to start a business so they went on to rent a shop or create a website, try to make a few sales, go all out for a few months and then stop completely.
Building a business is all about speed. If you had 24 hours to spend on a business it will be better to spend a hour a day spread over 24 days than spending 24 hours one day and do nothing the next day.
It takes time to develop a new company and for people to react to what you have to offer. Never lose focus and your speed and even if your business is only a part time initiative for you at the moment, make sure that every day you are making progress of some sort to move your company forward.
4) Doing It All Alone
Nobody is perfect or has the skills to do everything themselves. You need to understand what it is that you bring to the table and what you need to surround yourself with. If, for example, you are very strong at inventing but don’t want to sell then you need to find a salesperson to help you.
You won’t succeed by forcing yourself to do things that you truly don’t enjoy and will never be good at. Know where you stand and what value you can offer. By getting people around you who complement your skills, you will be able to achieve your goals and have a lot more fun along the way!
5) Not Hiring Right Away
You should begin looking at who can be brought on board to help you from the first day of starting your company. There will be tasks in any business that you, as the owner, should not be focusing on if you hope to build any sort of sizable organization. Why are you doing admin work when you should be out closing customers, talking to the media and landing new partnerships?
But I’m broke! How can I hire someone? Even if you have a $0 budget you can find people to work for you through high school and foreign student internship programs. Once you have a budget, you can bring people on board for as little as one hour a day (what I first did) and then increase their hours when you can afford it. You need to be spending your time working on the business and not in the business.
