How to Avoid Becoming a Failure Statistic

I clicked on this article thinking it was by Mike Brown of the Bengals telling us how to be a great entrepreneur.



How to Avoid Becoming a Failure Statistic
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/business/smallbusiness/28toolkit.html

By PAUL B. BROWN
Published: October 28, 2008
Times are tough. And while there is no definitive checklist governing what entrepreneurs should guard against, there do seem to be some commonalities.
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Several are well known, like the risks of being undercapitalized, having poor financial controls, hiring badly and refusing to delegate. But other problems may have escaped your attention.
POGO WAS RIGHT “Businesses perish in untimely ways, many of which are largely out of an entrepreneur’s control: There’s too much competition. The public is no longer interested in your product or service,” writes Geoff Williams in Entrepreneur. Or you could be a victim of bad luck, he says.
“But sometimes, the painful reality is that a business falls apart for one reason: You.” he writes. “In the end, when any company is suffering, there is a question every entrepreneur must ask when he or she looks in the mirror: Am I killing my own business?”
FOCUS, FOCUS AND FOCUS Underscoring the point that your biggest enemy could be you, Karyn Greenstreet, who describes herself as a self-employment expert and small-business coach, writes, “Dunn and Bradstreet recently did a study and determined that “90 percent of small businesses that fail do so because of a lack of skills and knowledge on the part of the owner.”
She suggests a tip that could keep you in business longer.
Entrepreneurs, she points out, frequently get excited about a new idea but they are either unable to figure out if it is a true opportunity, as opposed to a momentary blip in the marketplace. And even it is something worth considering, they don’t know how they should go about trying to capitalize on it.
What to do?
“Test every new idea against your business plan and mission statement before deciding whether to undertake it or not, and then ask yourself, Do I have the time and skill to implement this?”


KNOWLEDGE IS POWER Given the competitive landscape, a small-business owner needs to “understand his or her market as well as he or she understands their best friend, their spouse, or the back of their hand,” argues Shane Messer, chief executive of the Incubator Group, a private equity firm in Nashville. “So much so that they can predict movements and purchasing habits with uncanny accuracy.”
“I cannot stress this enough,” he adds. “The absolutely, positively, most important skill that you can develop, without exception, is the ability to learn your market so well that you can predict what will make people react, buy and feel satisfied. Without it, you will undoubtedly fail.”
THE OTHER GUY Allbusiness.com says learning about your market extends to understanding what the competition is doing.
“Consumer loyalty doesn’t just happen; you have to earn it. If you don’t take care of your customers, your competition will. Watch your competition as closely as you do your own employees.”
LAST CALL Invariably, entrepreneurs are given all kinds of suggestions. And while most of it is probably meant to be helpful, StartRunGrow.com, a small business resource site, has identified 10 of the “silliest bits of advice to ignore” when you are running a small business.
These are among our favorites:
¶“All you need to do is think success.” As the article points out, you can think all the positive thoughts you want, but nothing good is going to happen until you make it happen.
¶“There’s no reason why you can’t be as successful as So and So.” Sure there is. So and So could be smarter, have more capital, a better marketing plan, superior people, better skills.” You get the idea.
¶“You can always return to what you were doing before,” if things don’t work out. That may well be true, but as the article points out, “Never allow yourself an easy way out — because at the first sign of trouble, you’ll take it. Think winning, not retreating.”