Avoiding all the mistakes, being an entrepreneur, is pretty difficult. People make mistakes if they’re new or old in the business. It’s just unavoidable. However, one can learn from others’ experiences, professional business articles, magazines, etc and by picking a few points, would be able to successfully dodge a few bullets. It is really important for a CEO to be careful when making business decisions as outcomes depend on it.
Here is a list of a few mistakes that are commonly made by entrepreneurs.
1- Big Customer Syndrome
Usually what happens is that when most of the company’s revenue is generated by big customers, they often do not look for any more customers as a little number of big customers are enough to generate profit and are easier to manage. However, it is all good until due to some unfortunate issue, the customer decides to leave. With the client leaving, the company’s economy cripples, as he was a major source of income. And so, the company faces a lot of problems to get back on track.
Companies also tend to give their major clients some major discounts in order to satisfy them and keep their business, which leads to less profit. So one must always look for new customers and make plans to attract new ones.
2- The product that isn’t of interest to the market
At times, you come up with an idea of a product or service that would be of benefit to your customers and is related to your type of business. You, along with your team, invest money and effort into it and offer it to the market but no one buys it and so, your investments and effort goes down the drain and you’re just a product looking for a market. This happens because you got too occupied in carrying out your idea that you neglected the opinion and need of your customers.
So to avoid this, you go the other way around. When thinking of launching a product, ask your customers if they’d be interested in buying it. Also, if you’d be lucky enough, they’ll give you some of the best ideas of products that’ll definitely be needed in the market. If you still don’t get a good response, then move on to the next idea.
3- Keeping Prices Low
According to many, if they keep low prices, they’ll attract the most customers and will manage to earn more than the ones who’re selling at higher prices. However, this isn’t true as although they’ll manage to sell more volume, it’ll be with a much lesser profit. And a good profit is important to have as it is what you fund into marketing, developments for the betterment of your company, services and products, etc.
4- Being a Jack of all trades
Many entrepreneurs are just greedy for money and so want they keep expanding their business horizon as much as they can without properly researching and gaining knowledge about it. They diversify their line so much that they’re unable to pay proper attention to any sector, or product. This can reduce your income instead of increasing it such that none of your product would be perfect and will have many tiny flaws that won’t be able to satisfy your customers and this will, in turn, spoil your reputation.
So focus on a few things first and specialize in them and devote your energy and money into perfecting it so that there’s no one else that can reach your level of excellence in it. This will attract more customers than one expects.
5- Accept and learn from your mistakes
By accepting, we mean admitting your mistake and taking steps to reverse the adverse effect that your mistake had on your business.
Acceptance is very important in order to live a life with much fewer complications than you would otherwise have. It’s ok to make mistakes and not be perfect, but if you keep doing it in order to just prove yourself, right, even when there’s no way you can be, is wrong.
By accepting, you’ll easily take new steps to further improve your business and not damage it.
You should also learn from your mistakes and not just accept it as it’s the best teacher. Once you experience something yourself, you go through it yourself, and you learn a lot.
