Small businesses can fail and numerous big businesses have failed too. So, business failure is not a matter of size, there are secrets to it too. This is far from planning, businesses that plan the most, fail the most if they don't execute the plans. One action is much better than ten thousand good intentions without a single action.
Almost every start-up write a 26 page business plan, I've personally helped a lot of startups with that too but some never follow through to implementation. All they needed it for was to win an investor or raise some funds or attract a kind of partnership after which it's filed away and never used until some kind of problem arises.
The secret success of every business lies on these 4 things.
1 Team and leadership
The success of every business lies in the leadership of the business. I would love to ask you this question, feel free to answer it on the comment session. The question is on the picture below. Remember it's asking you about the most important, all of them are important but what do you consider as the most important in a business? I will be in the comment session to conclude it, give my opinion and why I think so.
2 grow big but stay small
Have you noticed that when businesses start newly, they listen to every user complain? They want to understand users' need and conscious about their product pricing but once they penetrate the market, everything changes. They become too big to listen to the customers, they raise product price and even reduce quality. For businesses like this, they think becoming a market leader means abusing the customers choice.
As a business, you need to know what attracted your customers to you and try to improve it better so you can keep them loyal while attracting more people. One major challenge big businesses have is difficulty in decision making and time delay of execution. Complains from clients to customer service takes time to climb the organisational ladder from head of the customer service to branch leader to area manager to regional manager to the country head and then the board members sit for meeting many days on the matter before making decisions.
The result is then passed down from region to area to branches and then to workers making changes take so much time. This waste of time is enough for a new business to disrupt the market and end your business. I would have mentioned names in the banking industry, phone industry, Telecom and certain household products but that would mean putting some brand in a bad image which won't be healthy. While expanding and growing stay small enough to be closer to your customers either by directing customer complain directly to top managerial level or giving lower managerial level enough power to make decisions in seemingly smaller issues.
3 Policies and market trend
A single policy is enough to kill a business or boost another business. The closing of borders in Nigeria today have ended a lot of business and of course, has boosted a lot of locally made goods too. A single policy, be it government or any other authority guiding your business operation can end your business. In 2018, the Chinese government expelled all Korean businesses out of China and a lot of businesses died instantly irrespective of how big or how small they were.
How can you use this to your benefit?
Know what the government is interested in and align your business to that. Look at the yearly budget of your government, what projects do they want to promote and then align your business to that. If the government is interested in promoting locally made goods, begin to align and make a shift to that. Makeshift especially to areas where the government wants to pump in money either as a grant, tax break or loans
Coming to market trends, things evolve to kill another. The days of kerosene lanterns have ended and given room to rechargeable lanterns and energy-saving bulbs. If you fail to understand and obey market trend, your business will be as good as dead. Evolve or dissolve.
4 Never run out of money
Sometimes in business, we know what to do that will take our business to a high level. We know just exactly what to do that will solve that business problem. We exactly know that next market move that once we make that move we will earn so much profit. But why don't we do it? Money. Yes, money.
When businesses run out of money and don't know how to attract investment either through equity or loans, it usually becomes the end of that business no matter how big they are. This is why you hear that a business closed down or that a business has been bought over by another business. Some businesses incur a lot of debt at a time like this just to scale through or probably merge with another. The advice is simple. Never Run Out of Money.
Reminder
I asked you a question at the beginning of this article, here is the question again. I will be waiting in the comment session to give a conclusion
No comments:
Post a Comment