10 Costly Business Mistakes You Are Most Likely Making

Richard Bezuidenhout, Managing Director of e-Magination InfoSolutions, gives us some handy pointers on pitfalls to avoid when starting and/or running your own business. We all know running a business is no easy feat, so let's take a page from Richard's book and get a little bit of a push-start.

Starting and running your own business is an extremely risky undertaking, and not to be entered into lightly. Although entrepreneurship is a thriving concept in South Africa with more and more businessmen and women taking the plunge and going out on their own, unfortunately, a lot of mistakes are made. Here is a list of the top 10 costly business mistakes you might be making:

Not knowing what it takes

A lot of people enter into entrepreneurship with little understanding as to what it takes to run a business. Many forget that they will need to work in their business while they work on their business. This can be very challenging, but simply means you will need to make time for both these roles.

Setting achievable goals

Set goals that are almost out of reach so that you maximise your motivation. Bigger goals help you to navigate through the difficult times, as they set a clear target to work towards.

Reluctance to take advice

Mentors or successful entrepreneurs have a lot to offer, and yet much of their advice is met with reluctance. Entrepreneurship has a lot to do with ‘gut feel’ but also comes with a lot of trial and error, better avoided by learning from those who came before you.

No timeline for success/failure

Many businesses struggle on for years because they have not set themselves clear timelines of where the business needs to be, and by when, to constitute a success or a failure. To avoid this crippling, you financially set clear limits or milestones that you absolutely have to reach.

Building the whole product first

There are a lot of ways to validate your business idea and get traction without spending months (or years) first completing your product. The risk you face is having invested resources and time in a product that might not even be relevant in the market anymore. Rather sell your ideas first and get valuable feedback that will help you provide a unique offering that might be completely different to your initial idea.

Not defining a process

Take time to define a process, even if it changes over time. This will help you to ascertain which areas of your process need refining, as they will hold up the sales cycle.

Losing touch with customers

Don’t assume that your customers are on Facebook or LinkedIn; find out where they are so that you don’t waste resources on platforms where they aren’t. Better yet, get out of the office and meet customers face to face (especially for B2B customers).

Not hiring soon enough

If you don’t hire soon enough your business will not grow, it will just plateau as you get busier. Hiring is an investment in your business, so do so when you are at 80% capacity.

Lacking sales

Too many startups focus on hiring engineers to develop the product when they should be growing their sales team to gain traction in the market first. If you want some ideas about selling you are free to contact me at Richard@emagination.co.za; I will give you some pointers on what you can do to improve the sales of your company.

Being a one man band

If you are the sole business owner right now, strongly consider taking on an equity partner. This enables you to share the load and benefit from both your strong points. You will only harm your business if you try to do everything on your own!

Richard Bezuidenhout

Managing Director at e-Magination InfoSolutions

Visit e-Magination

About the author

Richard has a tactical Forest Gump type way about business with more decades experience than a simple binary sequence can handle, he dreams of creating a work environment like Google. As old as he is fat.

Source: e-Magination InfoSolutions

Tags: business advice, guest post, Startup story