For every success story of startups that are launched with a small budget and only a small amount of business industry knowledge, there are hundreds more of failure.
The fact is that just under 50% of businesses fail within the first year, which means that out of every ten businesses that are launched, only five will make it past the first year. That’s a scary statistic, isn’t it?
Although launching a business is downright scary, especially with such low rates of success, there are ways that you can reduce the chance that your business will be one of the ones that fails. All you need to do is to ensure that you avoid the most common business blunders, and your business should be just fine.
For an insight into what mistakes you want to avoid making, read on – all is about to be revealed.
Not choosing the right mentor
Every startup requires a mentor to help them to guide their business in the right direction; the problem is that not every business own realizes this or the fact that choosing the right mentor is of the utmost importance. If you are going to have a mentor whose advice you listen to and use to build your business, you want to ensure that they have the knowledge and experience to help you to build your business from the ground up. If you are unsure of who to have as your mentor, take the time to do some research into the most successful business owners within your community, and then contact the ones you like the sound of most.
Failing to protect your ideas
Unless you patent your product ideas, you are not protected from other companies stealing your ideas. Which is why it’s so important to ensure that you keep any business ideas that you have on the down low until you have patented them. If you don’t patent your ideas, then you will struggle to protect them from being stolen, but once you’ve secured them with a patent, no one can steal them.
One of the biggest mistakes small businesses tend to make is failing to protect themselves from idea theft, which can impact their success severely.
Failing to invest in content marketing
Content marketing is, without a doubt, crucial for businesses of all shapes and sizes, just like a well-designed website is. However, far too many small businesses aren’t willing to invest in it, because they think it’s an unnecessary investment, but like the article ‘No SEO? Then Your Business Is DOA’ states, businesses need content marketing to have any chance of being successful. If you want to ensure that your business’s website gets plenty of traffic and ranks highly in search engines, using content marketing is crucial.
While you could deal with content marketing yourself, if you lack knowledge about this form of marketing, it’s probably best to call in the professionals to deal with your content marketing needs for you. As that way, you know that your business is in the hands of an expert, and don’t need to worry about your marketing not being as effective as it could be.
Not being willing to outsource
A lot of small business owners attempt to deal with every single task themselves, believing that it’s helping to cut costs and protect their brand from folding because of finances. While doing everything yourself may save you money, it’s not exactly the best idea. You see, if you deal with everything yourself, from your accounting to your
You see, if you deal with everything yourself, from your accounting to your social media management, you are going to lack time. This means that you get less time to spend on running the business itself and doing what you are good at, which will, in time, impact your success. Then there’s the fact that if you try and deal with everything yourself, even the things that you’re not trained or skilled in, it will most probably have an impact, and will make your business seem unprofessional.
Say, for instance, you opt to create your own blog content but aren’t a skilled writer and end up keyword stuffing. This will negatively impact your business for a range of reasons, which is why it’s best to outsource this task, and any others you don’t have the skills and experience to deal with.
Avoid business blunders
The blunders mentioned above are guaranteed to have a negative impact on the success of your small business, which is why it’s important to ensure that you avoid making them. After all, the last thing that you want is to be one of the businesses that fails within the first year and isn’t able to make a success out of your ideas.
