We make mistakes every day. Sometimes mistakes are welcomed because of learning potential that we receive from those mistakes. However, this depends on your ability to learn from mistakes. Probably you know that the best learning comes from the mistakes you have experienced.
But, also some errors can be fatal to you as an entrepreneur and your business. You must escape them.
Here is one list of some basic mistakes that can be fatal to every business.
1. Allow limiting beliefs to prevail in decision making
Sometimes you have your limiting beliefs that can impact negatively on a decision making process. If you base your decisions on those beliefs, you will make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes can be fatal for your company. Limiting beliefs are your beliefs for something that sometimes can be true, but sometimes they are not true. There is an excellent post about limiting beliefs on Steve Pavlina Personal Development Blog where he wrote:
Many limiting beliefs get installed during childhood, but that isn’t always the case. The pattern is that your mind drew false generalization based on one or more specific events. It assigned questionable meanings to those events, and those interpretations are disempowering you. As a result your mind blocks you from taking certain actions, even though the actions may be reasonable and intelligent choices.
Decision-making process must be free from these types of views, and you must base your process on careful analysis of the problem and choosing the optimal solution.
2. You don’t make market research
Every business exists in some market. On the market, the company is not alone. There are customers, competitors and other entities that have the influence on the business decisions or business decisions influence on them. You as an entrepreneur must do a marketing research, not one-time research but continuously. Without marketing research that will give you precise information on the market, there is a risk that limiting beliefs will prevail in the decision-making process (previous mistake). In one of the previous post titled as Marketing Research – What is It, Benefits, Process and Information Source, I write that:
Marketing research is the process of objective identification, collection, analysis, and distribution of information for assisting entrepreneurs and managers in decision making associated to the identification and solution of problems and opportunities in a market. The task of market research is to provide entrepreneurs and managers with important, accurate, reliable, valid, and current information in real time.
3. You don’t use a business plan
For some business, this mistake can be fatal but for other, this can emphasize that invention is the basis for their work, and business plans can be a waste of time.
However, the need for a business plan is obvious for all businesses only the format of the business plan is different. Some companies lose a big amount of time on the formalization of their business plans, and this is typical for the enterprises that want to attract new finances for their business growth. However, the need for business growth and optimal work is a business plan in the form of a blueprint that you will use as a roadmap to your business success. It’s simple.
4. You don’t offer your customers possibility of upselling
Using upselling is an excellent way to increase your profit. Your business already sells something to current customers, but why do not make another sale from them. You simply need to sell something else, in addition, to already sold products or services.
Every upsell will increase your profit. Ask one simple question: Why I need to leave money on the table? If your average selling is $1,000.00, you have 20 customers, and offer upsell products for $500.00 with the 10% conversion rate of up sale, you will have additional income of $1,000.00 (2 buyers x $500.00).
5. You don’t try to repeat selling to existing customers
Sometimes you are focused too much on finding new customers and forget repeating sales with current customers. The costs of finding new customers are larger than the costs to repeat a sale with current customers.
The magic of successful businesses is always to try repeating sales with current customers as an addition to work on finding new customers for growing the business.
6. You don’t try to increase a conversion rate of your sale’s funnel
Increasing the conversion rate is one of the must-have tasks in your everyday business activities. Higher conversion rate means more sales and more profit for your company.
If you have 10% conversion rate why you do not try to increase it on 11, 15 or 20% conversion rate. You can read more about conversion rate and metrics of the sale’s funnel in the previous post about Most Important Metrics of Your Sale’s Funnel.
7. You don’t try to make your sales funnel to be always full
Another important metric of your sales funnel is incoming fresh leads that you can convert into customers. If you always have sufficient quantity of leads at the wider side of your sales funnel, you will always have customers for your business.
8. You don’t use social media as a part of your marketing strategy
There are not individuals and businesses that today don’t have a presence in some social media. Building social media presence can have a significant potential today and for sure will have much bigger in the future for every business. Because of that, your mistake will be if you escape this reality and don’t start building your presence in the most important social media for your business.
9. You want to escape from technology
Technology is something that cannot be followed simply by the changes that come in every second. However, technology is something that can improve every aspect of your business and entrepreneurial life. It can help you even your business is not in some technology industry. One of the mistakes that entrepreneurs make is escaping from the new technology because of fear of changes.
10. You don’t improve your business on an everyday basis
Possibilities for improvements are infinity. In every aspect of your business operations can you can find something that can be better. Avoiding improvements can stop the growth of your business. This mistake also come because of fear of changes.
