Is Your Startup Doomed To Fail?

The startup. A business that’s ready and raring to go; fresh faced with so many ideas and the means to get them done. And yet, it goes downhill from there. Lost revenue, no consistent baseline profits, and it’s hard to keep a hold of a good employee. And you’re not alone in experiencing this. With about 90% of startups eventually failing without moving out of the SME stage these days, you’ve got a pretty strong statistic to conquer.

When it comes to establishing your own business, there’s a whole mountain of planning to get through before you even try to register a business name. Once you’ve got through all the steps, you’re excited, you’re optimistic about the future, and you feel like you can take on the world. However, there’s a lot you can get wrong at this point, and sometimes they end up putting an expiry date on your plans. But if you know where you can go wrong, you can keep away from some of those most common mistakes every business owner ends up making at some point throughout their career.

Having No Experience

Chances are that if you’re just thinking of starting your own company, you’ve got no real skills in the areas you need them most. Of course you can learn on the job, and having a beginner have a go at the ropes is the best way to ingrain the right techniques into your mind. However, don’t let yourself enter such a cutthroat world without knowing the basics.

You’re going to need determination to keep going no matter the cost, and the motivation to learn as much as you can whilst you do so. No business runs itself after all, and your small-time enterprise is most at risk from your relative inexperience.

Using A Basic Idea

Using a basic idea is something that makes a lot of areas of your startup plan go wrong, and one of the biggest areas it affects is the speed at which you try to get established. You move too fast, without thought to what the market is going to do to your idea when all you have behind you is the idea that your company is needed to fill a gap. However, have you done your market research right? Have you looked at competitors in the same field as you? And there’s going to be some! Why have they succeeded in this area?

Don’t let yourself move too fast into any idea you’ve come up with, and make sure you’re taking it as slow as you need to to properly get your resources together. Let yourself make mistakes before it truly matters and refine your product or service over and over again until you actually understand who you’re selling to. If you don’t, and if no one knows why your product should matter to them, it’s time to cut yourself out of the game and try harder next time.

Having Nowhere To Run Your Business

When you don’t have a proper base to run your operations from, it’s going to be hard to keep a workforce together, and the responsibility is going to drain it out of you. You’re going to have trouble fulfilling your payroll, and then you’re immediately off to bat with a bad reputation.

So make sure you’ve got the right resources behind you before you find a place to work from, and don’t go too big far too soon. You’ll need a smaller space to simply fit your first employee or so into, with the means to keep your office running from the website, on call to answer any queries from customers and potential investors alike. Find office space for rent instead of buying something outright; when you’re renting, you’re going to make less of a mistake paying for a place you can’t actually afford based on your startup profits.

You Don’t Prioritize

Running your own business is always going to be something lengthy and arduous to undertake, but there is in fact a right and wrong way of doing things. Depending on the sector you’re in, of course, your responsibility list can either be extremely long or something you can accomplish within a day. However, make sure you get the most important tasks out of the way first; and you’ll need to know which ones these are.

First of all, you’re going to need to set up a budgeting plan, as just finding your capital and socking it away to take care of itself and your new company isn’t ever going to turn out well. You need to know where this money is going to go before you spend anything. You’re going to need inventory, and a trustworthy supplier with good rates. Do you have employees? Setting up the payroll is never something that can be set aside. At the end of each day, make sure you’re looking over the books to see where they can be better balanced, as the details of your financial operation are what add up to make the big picture you’re aiming for.

Not Networking Properly

Networking makes you connections, and it’s these connections that allow you to sit at the big table and sup with some of the best business owners out there. These are all smart people you’re talking to after all, and you can learn good things from every single one of them.

So when you’re thinking of establishing a startup, you’re going to need to get involved with the other people in your area. Drop them some emails, be courteous and professional, and attend all of the business conferences you can possibly take part in. When you’ve got people listening to you, aware of your existence, and when these people have their own mini empires behind them, you’ve got some good friends on your side.

Not every startup is going to be doomed to fail, and a lot of them can claw back from the edge. However, you can avoid going there in the first place.