Some Mistakes to Dodge for Ensuring Small Business Success

There are many reasons why many small businesses tend to fail. However, most of these failures can be accounted for some common mistakes fresh entrepreneurs tend to make. In this article, we discuss some such weighty mistakes you can mindfully avoid to get your small business to survive and thrive.

Everyone wants their business to succeed. For a small business, you have to aim far beyond success; it needs to thrive. On exploring the stats regarding small business success, you can find that many failed in the first one to three years. So, how can you plan your small business to succeed and thrive for a longer period. The key to success here is to avoid the far-too-common pitfalls in entrepreneurship. Let us explore these mistakes one by one and ways to avoid them.

Major small business mistakes

#1: Trying to build a business around what your wish than what actual customers want

Anyone who plans to start a business thinks that they have the most wonderful business idea to bring into action. But, if it is not a good fit to build a customer base, any bright idea will not take a flight. So, before you spend your energy and resources into building a business of your wish, do a proper analysis tool to identify if it is something needed by the customers or not. Many new entrepreneurs, in their excitement to prove themselves, tend to skip this step. By jumping into the business process without testing the idea well, they tend to fail spectacularly.

If you plan to give your business an ideal life, it is important to test it well on the real market before investing in it. There are many modes of testing your idea, as we discuss below:

  • Market research: You may have to initiate a business that connects directly with real customers. So, why do you not take the initiative to know directly from the customers about their needs? Talk to the customers through surveys and focus groups. It is necessary to know your customers and their needs to custom tailor your offerings to them as an ideal solution to their needs and problems.
  • Competitor research: To succeed in a highly competitive market, you may not want to rip off the competition or steal the idea of another one. But it is advisable to seek what other similar businesses are doing in your target market to gain some insight about developing your strategies. With competitor analysis, you will know what the customers are looking for and whether your business idea is in tune with the market needs.
  • Dig online: You may ask questions and get the assistance of experts through platforms like Quora. There are many online forums and focus groups that you can join to gain insight into small business success. Experts of Flosum can also help you with such valuable business insights. If you effectively engage with these groups, you will get many bits of valuable information from experts and similar-minded entrepreneurs out there.

#2: Playing the jack of all trades

Of course, being a small or startup business owner, you may have to wear many hats. But if you put it all on, then ultimately, these will weigh you down. One major mistake new entrepreneurs tend to make is to venture into everything and play the jack of all trades. They may take up all roles as CEO, administrator, operations handler to the marketer, and the list goes on. Whenever there is a need, they tend to roll up their sleeves and jump into it.

However, the truth is that trying to do everything on your own is an unsustainable model. On the other hand, it may also be detrimental sometimes. No matter how dedicated you are to your business and how talented you are in multitasking, there are more things always to get done that are not there in your wheelhouse.

If you want to build a sustainable model of execution, do not plan to do everything by yourself. As the best course of action, you should hire a good team with the right people for the right tasks and delegate them to work on their best roles. You may also think of outsourcing the tasks to qualified consultants with the proper expertise. They will help manage various areas of your business which you do not enjoy doing and bring the best out of it for you.

Taking this approach effectively will help you focus on your right tasks and dedicate your fullest to them. So, in a nutshell, the essence of this approach is that if you want to have a successful and sustainable business over time, you should take off many of the hats you otherwise ready to wear and find the right heads to fit them on to.

#3: Turn your heads away from technology

As we have seen, it is a mistake if you do not delegate your business tasks to experts. On the other side of it, it is not always necessary to delegate tasks to only people. Many advanced technologies can help you accomplish different business tasks much faster and with increased efficiency.

Modern-day businesses need to leverage the technological tools for business management to get things done the right way. Apt tools will help you maximize your business’s impact and reach and leverage the benefits like first to market and time-critical project accomplishment etc. Say, for example, if you want to launch a new product and may not want to leverage the e-commerce tools available in the market, then your product’s reach may be limited.

On another example, consider if you are managing your invoicing and payment process in the conventional manual mode. This may not only eat up a huge amount of your time and effort but also take away the new-age consumers who largely rely on digital modes of finances. They will immediately switch to another vendor who makes these interactions more convenient for them through online payments.

Some other mistakes, including not striking a fine balance between the day-to-day operations and long-term goals and not handling your finances properly. So, while starting your business or running a small business, always be on the move without getting stuck in your ways. Have a flexible approach to strategizing your business moves and leveraging advanced technology benefits to improvise your business performance.

Heron Nelson
 

Heron is a business blogger with a focus on personal finance and wealth management. With over 7 years of experience writing about financial topics, Heron has established herself as a trusted voice in the personal finance space. She has a deep understanding of financial concepts and strategies, and is able to explain them in a relatable and actionable way for her readers.