3 Most Common Mistakes People Make When Starting a Business
Brad Smith • February 4, 2020
When starting your own business, it can be both rewarding and challenging at the same time. However, the road to success is not always an easy one. There are innumerable hurdles that might keep coming your way. A study found that the failure rate of companies, even after five years is 50 percent.
The good news is that you can still learn effective entrepreneurial skills from the mistakes of others. Here are some of the most common mistakes that startups make that you should avoid.
1. Not conducting adequate market research
- You might have a brilliant product, however you need to conduct adequate market research to understand whether there is a market for it. No matter how brilliant and idea might be, if it doesn’t solve people’s problems it can’t be successful.
- Lisa Stone, co-founder and CEO of BlogHer, says she started her company by listening to women bloggers. They figured out what they wanted and then came up with the idea of their business to support women bloggers. What started off with 300 bloggers has now reached 14 million people.
2. Being myopic about end goals.
- Many startup entrepreneurs equate their business’ success with getting funded. Most of the time when startup business receives big investments they make headlines. This creates a false sense of end goals.
- You shouldn’t become complacent upon securing funding. Big investments are necessary to keep you going but you need to continue focusing on your end objective and making your business successful.
- One of the most common misconceptions about startups is that once you get some initial success the rest is easy. Eric Rea, CEO and co-founder of Podium, says that this is untrue. Rea explains that his company’s growth so far is because they’ve never lost sight of their end goals.
3. Not delegating tasks to team members
- A successful entrepreneur should be able to logically assess their own strengths and weaknesses. You need to understand that you may not have the skills required to do all the work entirely by yourself.
- If you want to succeed, you must learn to delegate tasks to people who are better suited for them. When you work as a team you will gain from other people’s skills and expertise and won’t run the risk of burning out.
- Steve Jobs once said that the first ten employees of a startup ultimately determine its success. Having basic knowledge of all aspects will help you succeed, but you need to hire the right people for managing the aspects in which you aren’t proficient
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