Launching A New Business? Avoid These 8 Mistakes!

The start of a business brings with it its own share of obstacles and difficult circumstances especially when your start-up is backed by limited investment and support of less people. But it can be one of the most adventurous journeys that is food for your soul. While you have the power to bring ideas to life, build a team of talented professionals and give the desired structure to your business, you must know that some silly mistakes can postpone the success of your business.

Since the concept of building a business is new to you, it becomes important to learn from the mistakes of other entrepreneurs and do your homework well in advance so that you don’t face finance crunch or loss of clients in the initial stage itself. However, you won’t be the only person to commit mistakes as most successful entrepreneurs have admitted making crippling business mistakes. But they eventually recovered after learning from their mistakes and taking advice of experienced mentors. If you are launching a new business and want to ensure that it gets the right headstart, then here is a list of 8 mistakes that you need to avoid:

1. Trying To Be The Jack Of All Trades

In your thirst of being most productive to the business in the initial stages, as an entrepreneur you may feel like multi-tasking all the time. In a bid to attain perfection and to ensure timely job completion, you may end up loading yourself with all kinds of tasks for establishing your business’ strong foundation. Since the business requires your complete attention at its infancy stage, you must definitely start delegating different tasks to your team and explain them how you expect the work to be done. This will give you ample time and a clutter free mind for focusing on the areas of the business that needs your sole attention.

While delegating jobs and responsibilities seems to be an easy task, in reality, it is tough because every individual in your team has his / her own working traits. However, when you actually want the end results to be great and want to invest time on more priority tasks, then you are left with the only option of trusting your employees and allowing them to be their creative best during task execution.

2. Not Having Interest In The Business Domain

No matter how much time, money and efforts you are investing, you won’t be able to go far with your business if you are not interested in it. Sometimes due to current and predicted trends, entrepreneurs may get lured to run a business they have least interest in as it is the money factor that attracts them. But your business should be born out of your passion and you must deeply care what you are doing and for whom you are building it for. This is how you get the strength to overcome the inevitable obstacles that accompany start-ups. No successful entrepreneur became successful through a winning formula or just got lucky one day. They have been attaining success every minute they have put in their business, because they were emotionally attached to the cause.

3. Not Imposing Accountability

In case one or some of your team members are not punctual to office or team meetings and you being their leader have not taken any action against late comings, then it sends a message that such kind of behaviour is acceptable in your office. Many entrepreneurs don’t prefer to be the ‘bad boss’ who keeps nagging his / her employees. But in the process of being friendly with your team members, you are somehow compromising with work ethics, workplace ambience and the quality of work.

Since you and your team are wholly and solely responsible for making the business a huge hit in the future, it becomes your responsibility to enforce punctuality and accountability so that every person takes every task of the business with same seriousness as you. Earn your team’s respect and help them connect with your business’ goals and encourage them to follow best work practices without being rude at all.

4. Seeking Perfection More Than Improving Performance

Entrepreneurs do possess a zest for details but when it comes to moving forward and keeping the progress levels consistently soaring, then it is not the perfection that needs to be your priority. Business in initial stages can never achieve perfection and in fact, many changes and amendments must be incorporated to get the ship of the business sailing even during tough times. In your endeavour of getting things perfect, you may overlook certain opportunities that you can utilise for solving several of your real problems. Of course, when it comes to finances, marketing strategies and maintaining customer relations, detailing is quite important, but for petty tasks, you can take temporary decisions and move on.  

5. Launching A Highly Expensive Website Right On Day One

When your start-up is growing, it is your duty to ensure that resources are optimally used in the right direction. On the first day of your business when you already have to incur important expenses, building a fancy website without knowing who your target audience are, will definitely be a decision that you will repent later. Being an entrepreneur who is concerned initially about building a brand image of being customer centric, you must go for the basic website. An informative website initially will invite people to know who you are and what you have to offer.

Before having your business in marketplace, when you launch a flashy and expensive website, you will still have to make efforts to penetrate into a competing market. Being a start-up, your focus must to educate people about your products or services and gradually grow, adapt and then incorporate changes to suit the changing needs of your customers.  

6. Rebranding A Product More Often Despite Poor Response

This is probably one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs commit while launching a new business. Many entrepreneurs have tried this gimmick of changing the name or packaging of an utter flop product and then facing failure again. Successful entrepreneurs are those who don’t cheat with their customers and who learn from their past mistakes.

If you have a product that doesn’t sell despite having no issues in the packaging or product itself, then it is time to have a look at other factors affecting the sales volume. Inappropriate pricing strategies, wrong marketing techniques, poor analysis of target segment, etc. are some of the crucial determinants that may need your immediate attention. Conducting surveys, gathering data from various online and offline sources and interpreting the data can offer you perfect solutions to make your efforts worthy.  

7. Indulging In Unnecessary Expenses

Since your start-up’s growth will depend how wisely you allocate your limited funds in productive business arenas, you must avoid spending them on luxuries such as office, computer setups, fax machines, etc. Though these things will be a need in the future, a bit of compromises in the initial stage of your enterprise can help a lot in contributing to the growth aspects of your business. Whether you are starting the business all by yourself or have handful of employees, if they are willing to work from home, then why is the need to incur huge expenses of renting an office premise and getting it decked up. All the goodies that you want for your office location will come with the passage of time because smart handling of funds in the beginning will enable you to dedicate those funds to activities that yield in high revenue or profits.

8. Allowing Employees To Work On Their Personal Laptops

Another major mistake while launching a new business is being a miser. While as an entrepreneur it is your prime duty to ensure that funds are judiciously spent in the beginning, but allowing your employees to work on their personal laptops so that you don’t have to buy for them is one big mistake. Many start-ups do this without being aware of the demerits of doing so. When you allow your employees to use their personal laptops for work purposes, they may accumulate passwords, save confidential documents and other business related information, which may get misused when they eventually leave your organisation.

Recommended: Fire Up Your Business With Zuckerberg’s Motivational Ideas