A startup business statistically speaking, doesn’t typically have a very good chance of making it. Out to all the small businesses that start each year, only one in twenty make it past the third year. They fail because of shortsightedness on the part of the entrepreneurs starting those businesses – shortsightedness in the very conception of an idea for the business, and shortsightedness in the way they bring it to market. Let’s look at some of the most common ways in which startup businesses trip up and why this happens to them.
Watching sitcoms, it’s a pretty common comedic twist to a story to have someone go through a divorce, and coming out of it, to quickly throw themselves into another relationship – in sitcom parlance, they call it a rebound relationship. It’s funny in a sitcom, because everyone knows that it’s going to crash and burn. What happens in the startup business world isn’t all that different. People often try to start a business just because they happen to have lost a job and are not sure where to go next. You can’t start your business just because you don’t have a job, or because you feel you need to feel better about yourself, to copy the success of a friend or to find a tax shield. Success in running a small business comes from being deeply passionate about the things that the business is about. That’s what brings in leadership and managerial competence.
A startup business is kind of like a prematurely born baby. It needs a great deal of special care and incubation before it’s ready for the world. People who enter a business without the passion for it make the mistake often of hurriedly borrowing a marketing plan or business plans from elsewhere without paying attention to whether the plan is right for their kind of business or in their market. For success of any kind in the starting of a business, an entrepreneur needs to be able to resist the temptation to borrow plans and schemes from elsewhere. One needs the commitment to one’s business to tailor everything for it from scratch.
Poor selling practices are a major reason why a startup business often suffers such poor outlook. Pricing is haphazard often, and businessmen often neglect to think about cultivating a customer. All they are worried about usually is making the sale – on a transaction-by-transaction basis. Successful businesses treat each sale as the start of a new relationship, and try to establish a way to strengthen the possibility that they might continue to obtain business from that customer in the future. In the end, it is shortsightedness through and through that is the undoing of the start of a business. If people starting out at a business endeavor could give it their all, success could undoubtedly be theirs.