Mistake number 1:
- Starting a Business without a Purpose
Many young entrepreneurs have problem with choosing where they will invest or the kind of business they will do. This has made many to jump from one business to the other. When one seems not to be yielding the kind of thing they expect, they change.
Purpose simply means you have to ask yourself the following questions, what venture do I really love?, do I have the right skills to start?, What is the need I will be meeting when I Start? Who will need my goods or service?
Without purpose, life is lived in frustration and agony. Without the right skill you will kill your business. Without knowing the need to meet, you will never know where you are needed.
Take time to study your environment and discover the needs of the people around you and see how to solve the problem. You may not innovate something entirely new but you can think of a way of improving and packaging what has been in existence. Note these three facts
- People don’t pay you just for your effort; they pay you for the solution you are able to offer.
Look at the diagram below, there are eight bulbs, but no there is only one that people will be will to pay for. It’s not about having bulbs but bulbs that can give light. It’s not about starting a business it’s about the need you want to meet…
- If you want to be great you must solve great problems. Mega money for mega solution.
Mistake number 2
- Lack of Planning
It is often said that “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail”. An average entrepreneur doesn’t need to start without planning. Planning is so important that if not done will eventually crash the business.
You have to strategically plan every aspect of your business, it’s not only a must, but also builds habits that every entrepreneur should develop, implement, and maintain.
The act of business planning is so important because it requires you to analyze each business situation, research and compile data, and make conclusions based mainly on the facts as revealed through the research.
Business planning also serves a second function, which is having your goals and how you will achieve them, on paper.
You can use the plan that you create both as map to take you from point A to Z and as a yardstick to measure the success of each individual plan or segment within the plan
Mistake Number three
- Inability to Identify those who need you
Define who your ideal customer is or target market. Ask yourself the following questions (Who and where your customers are past, present and future?), what matters most to your customers (i.e Price, quality, size, timing).
This is a very key area of every business. Like those of us in the software industry, we try to know what matters most to our users and how to create user friendly applications that users can easily navigate without having to call us.
For example, if you sell books, you have to be located close to a school, depending on the kind of books you sell.
Most companies experience 80% of their business from 20% of their customers. It makes sense then to direct your time and energy toward those customers who are most important.
