Small businesses are dear to my heart. Mainly because I have a first-hand experience building and growing my own business. Just like all other small businesses out there, I walked through my own set of struggles, mistakes, failures and wins. It breaks my heart to see how many small businesses continue failing. After years of working with small business owners around the globe, here’s my take on why businesses fail.
If you aren’t an entrepreneur, don’t worry. Following can be applied to any project or life situation. Enjoy!
1. Failure to plan
This is a big one. Way too many entrepreneurs fall in love with their idea, but fail to map out the plan of action. Instead of managing their resources and energy wisely, they end up being stretched to the limit – whether financially, or physically, or in any other area. Planning helps you prepare. It also helps you manage wisely. And most importantly, it also prevents you from making major mistakes. If you never had a plan and you tend to be surprised with how much something costs or how something does or doesn’t work, if you tend to walk in the dark without seeing a path, how about setting aside some time to set some goals and decide on your next steps? Click here for my goal setting tips.
2. Failure to start
Ideas are great, but unfortunately, world is also full of wonderful ideas that have never been brought to fruition. It’s important to remember that nothing will happen unless someone takes action. Action is a must if you want to see your business improve. If you are a person who gets stuck dreaming about wonderful things you could do, how about picking one and making it happen? Instead of over-thinking what can potentially go wrong, how about taking that leap and finding out what WILL actually happen?
Ideas are great, but action turns them into reality. Take action! Click To Tweet3. Failure to edit
This one really startles me. If you keep doing the same mistakes, you can try to do as many as you want to, you’re not going to see better results. The key is to evaluate what is, decide on what needs to be done differently and then making changes necessary to improve your results. Evaluation and improvement are the keys to success. Do you take time to evaluate your results or do you keep walking blind-folded without understanding what’s working fine and what’s causing you to fail? Click here to check my tips to help you evaluate and improve.
4. Failure to listen
This could be part of the previous mistake, but in its core, this is a stand alone mistake. Some people DO edit and course correct on their own, but fail to realize that our view is limited. In business and in life it’s necessary to get others opinion. Not always and not anybody. What I mean is expert opinion. You ask someone who walked the walk before you, someone who is where you would like to go. Someone who has experience or knowledge that you don’t have. Click here to learn more about building your inner circle.
5. Failure to finish
Even though I don’t believe that you should necessarily finish everything you start, giving up on your dreams or great opportunities never helped anyone. When facing challenges and obstacles, you can choose to course correct or turn around and leave. Those who leave will never accomplish anything significant in life. Don’t waste your life starting projects that never get finished.
6. Failure to partner up
I could have called this one failure to let go of and I wouldn’t be too far from truth. As much as I’d like to say that I didn’t mess up this one, I’ll be honest here. One of the biggest reasons my business took so long to take off was due to my failure to partner up with others who had skills I didn’t have, but needed. It took me months to learn to edit and update my website, set up my email marketing, shopping cart, payment processing and everything else. Yes, it’s good, because I know how my systems run in the back end, but it’s also true that I held myself back from launching my business due to my head being constantly in learning mode. Here’s a question for you… Is it time for you to stop investing in your weaknesses and start partnering up with people who are strong where you are weak? Is it time to let go of your desire to control every step of the process? Or is it time to trust that you’ll be able to do more faster together? Just a thought…
Nobody knows it all. Partner up to move forward faster. Click To Tweet7. Failure to give up
You must give up to go up. There is no success without sacrifice. It’s no wonder that business owners who are not willing to give up bad habits, bad character traits, old ways of thinking and doing things are doomed to fail. What brought you here isn’t going to take you there. Success requires new thinking, new habits and new skills. Are you willing to give up what is holding you back? Will you choose red pill or hold on to blue one? Click here to read more on this topic.
There is no #success without sacrifice. Click To TweetBefore I end, I want to remind you that no failure has to be final. You decide when it’s over. You can call it quits or you can choose to learn and improve. Failure can simply become source of your learning, cause for innovation or one less thing to try again. No matter how big of a failure you’ve experienced, remember that there’s always a way out. You can do this! It’s your game. The game of life, where you get to choose your next turn.
Action step: Identify what failure is slowing your small business down and do something about it today.
To your success,
