Business men and women are amazing people. They are willing to take risks so that their product or service has a chance of succeeding in the next few years. Successful entrepreneurs know that you need more than optimism and hard work to make a business venture work. There are mistakes that can seriously hurt a business or even cause them to fail. Here are some common mistakes and some advice on how to avoid them.
Wrong Team
Just like choosing a team to play basketball in the schoolyard, you want to pick a team that has a good chance of winning. Choosing the wrong team or hiring the wrong people can seriously hurt your business. It is important to hire people with varying skill sets and the same common values. You want a team that will be able to trust each other and work well together under pressure.
Bad Pricing
This mistake usually occurs in the manufacturing industry. Usually, businessmen do not have complete understanding of costing and end up pricing their products badly. Aside from covering the usual costs like inventory, labor, and shipping, you also need to look at excess inventory, cost of taxes, delays due to bad weather, and shipping to name a few. These factors may seem small but can add up over the years and end up eating your bottom line. To get an exact calculation for pricing, companies need a double markup to cover the overall cost of marketing. If you can’t figure this out, try to talk to somebody qualified, such as an accountant.
Miscalculating Launch Time
New entrepreneurs are usually excited to let the world know about their new product. They are so excited they sometimes launch products without fixing bugs or preparing properly for worst case scenarios. Even if you’re having a “soft opening”, it is always better to leave a good impression than a bad one. Launching early can actually hurt your business rather than help it. Businesses in the food industry launch early so their staff can get hands on training ensuring that everything goes smoothly during the grand opening. If you’re still training people and you don’t have somebody experienced to take up the slack, the disappointed customers could leave with a bad taste in their mouth and not come back when everything’s set up. Worse, their experience could be so bad, they tell friends about their negative experience at your place.
Personal Experience Is Not Expertise
If you’ve been keeping fit your whole life, you would think that you have what it takes to run a fitness center. After all, how hard can keeping fit be if you’ve been doing it for a long time, right? The bad news is that running a fitness center is not the same as keeping fit. You have to train people need expertise in how to grow the business, market it, and price it so that it remains competitive. Remember that experience is not equal to acumen. Take courses, train, and study to gain knowledge of the business you’re going into. The more you know, the more ways you can find to help your business survive and succeed.
Cheap Marketing
With the advent of social media, many businesses think that there’s no need to spend money on marketing. Some think that there is no need to market their product because it is so good, people are sure to buy it. What these businessmen do not understand is that if people do not know their product, how are they going to buy it, let alone know about it? Despite what people think, social media is not free. You need to know about it in order to make it an effective marketing tool. If you want to do social media marketing properly it will take months before you can see actual results. If you want people to find you, don’t skimp on marketing.
