The benefits of starting a business are rewarding and the associated risks can be deterring. Starting a new business comes with endless challenges and sometimes huge opportunities for growth when you do it right. Face the fact that you could fail and take the necessary steps to improve and increase your chances of success.
# Whether you are bootstrapping or being funded from external sources (angles or VC’s) you could fail, if you mismanage your limited resources. Most businesses are not able to take off because they allocated resources wrongly and hoped things would be different. Don’t make that mistake, spend only when it’s absolutely necessary. If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.
# When your value proposition is not strong enough to convince prospective customers to buy from you. You have to stand out from your competition. What you are offering should be valuable enough to win customer confidence.
# Your new business is likely to fail when you assemble just any team instead of hiring smart and training skill.
Related: Fail Fast, Learn and Succeed Faster
# Funding doesn’t make you successful—customers do. When you don’t have customers who are willing to sign on to your product.
# Overestimating your ability to generate revenue. You may not generate revenue as you expect, prepare for it. If you build your business around the assumption that you will generate income at a specific time to support operation, you may be heading for disaster.
# When your product’s actual worth is less than what you think. Validate your idea properly and get the feedback about what people actually need, not what you think they want.
# Most entrepreneurs abandon the vision and loose interest. If you are not passionate enough about the idea or business you want to start, you will not be able to get to your destination. Starting a new business requires your total commitment and perseverance. If you are not passionate about your idea, you could give up easily.
# A great business takes time to mature. Do not make a short-term goal to be the next Google and think you can do that in a few years. Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone said the other day “Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success“. When you make a short-term goal and you don’t achieve it, you will be depressed and you are likely to give up. Think long-term and work toward that goal.
# All markets are prone to change and successful entrepreneurs and business leaders are constantly looking out for those changes and adapting to them. If you are seeing significant growth in your business, it’s about time you watch out for key trends that could change your market and adopt them when necessary. A lot of great business have been overtaking because they refused to change.
You can’t expect to meet the challenges of today with yesterday’s tools and expect to be in business tomorrow.-Unknown
Starting a business is an endless challenge and the opportunities for learning and growth are equally endless. If you believe in your idea and customers are ready to use it, give it a try, stick with it, get the right minds on it and see it grow into a great company.
According to Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, “In Silicon Valley, the fact that your enterprise has failed can actually be a badge of honor.The more that you can embrace all the little failures you have, and treat them as ways of improving the system, the less likely that the entire system will collapse.”
If you have failed in your recent project, do not give up. Your ability to bounce back from a failed business can determine your success rate in the end. Failure as an opportunity for improvement. Learn from your mistakes and do not repeat them in your next project. Startups that survive grow faster than more-established companies, according to Business Dynamics Statistics data funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.