Focus

Starting a business is an exciting, but often scary, new venture. As an entrepreneur, you may feel a lot of pressure to succeed because if you don’t, the fault of failing lays only on you. This pressure can be enough to psych someone out and prevent them from putting their best foot forward — a crucial step for an entrepreneur. However, by being proactive and not letting fear or pressure get in your way, you can successfully achieve your business goals. 

Fear of Failure

Most entrepreneurs encounter failure at some point, and that’s okay. Those who get it right the first time are few and far between, and these rare individuals often luck out by simply knowing the right person or being at the right place at the right time. The truth is, starting a business is a lot of work, and even with an extensive background in business, you’re going to have to make a few mistakes along the way to learn from them and figure out how to do things right. Every failure brings you a step closer to finding the answer to your business, so take the missteps in stride and consider them valuable experience. 

Lack of Vision

When starting a business, it’s important to have a clear vision of what you want to create and to be driven by the desire to bring those ideas to life, rather than by the idea of making a profit. Entrepreneurs who start a business simply to create a job for themselves and see the money roll in are often not sufficiently determined in their business plan. Because new businesses don’t usually see a profit until after a few years, half of these businesses close within five years. 

Not Doing the Research

Great ideas can only take you so far. As an entrepreneur, you’re responsible for cultivating a business plan that will grow through every step of your business. Therefore, each aspect of your business plan should be calculated and account for the growth you hope to see in your business. Each investment you make should be an educated and thought-out business decision, as well as backed with the research of the proposed return on investment and what it will help the business achieve. There are scores of data available on every kind of business, and by using this data in your decision-making, you can learn from the experiences of other businesses.

Becoming Complacent

Capitalism drives startup business as much as it drives large corporations. To run a successful business, it’s necessary to not only keep up with your competition, but to work to get ahead of them and to innovate continuously. Even if your business has steady customers and is meeting its necessary business sales to remain afloat, you should always continue looking for ways to meet more customer needs and attain more business — because if you don’t, someone else will.

However, it can be difficult to know how to do this, which is why more than 80 percent of enterprises consider in-database analytics the most critical predictive analytics platforms. This is the information that helps Starbucks decide what city corner to place their new location on or what style of sweater JCPenney or Kohl’s should keep in stores for longer. By researching what customers want and need, and how to successfully deliver these things, you can fill the customer needs that other businesses aren’t filling and market your business by highlighting these areas where you rise above the competition.

Not Setting Goals

When starting a business, entrepreneurs often create elaborate plans for how they will grow their business from the ground up because it’s necessary to think at least that far into the future. However, once the business gets started, some owners may not realize that’s only the beginning of the work they need to do to continue growing their business. 

Unless a business is constantly striving to meet goals and able to pivot plans when something unexpected occurs, a company can’t continue to grow and sustain itself. Successful entrepreneurs know that a business needs to constantly work towards something. If business leadership doesn’t know where to go next, the organization won’t go anywhere. 

After your business has gained some traction, it’s usually a good time to look for business partners and other professionals who can help give expertise insight on how you can improve it. One person simply does not have enough insight to take a business down a path of success without other intelligent business partners to support their original ideas. Entrepreneurs need to find the right people who share their vision and will help take the business where it needs to go. 

Not Protecting the Business

Everything an entrepreneur has should be protected. It’s one thing to never have the ability to open the business or shop at all, but it’s an entirely different thing to lose it after putting all of the work in to finally make it happen. 

From the get go, an important investment for businesses to make is to acquire business insurance that will protect them from any number of incidents. Whether your business has a brick-and-mortar location or is based solely online, business insurance can help protect you against cybercriminals, customer information breaches, and data theft. Although it can seem unlikely that an online business will suffer such damages, in the age of the internet and advanced technology, protection against cybercrime is more important than ever.

It’s no secret that the life of an entrepreneur is fraught with challenges and, by extension, a high failure rate for those who do pursue personal business endeavors. However, a surefire way an entrepreneur can find themselves victim to these threats is by failing to take steps to proactively combat them. Entrepreneurs must not fear failure. They should be willing to make investments and take leaps of faith to build their business, as creating a successful business never comes without risk. By making educated investments, developing a clear vision, setting ambitious but clear, attainable goals, and taking care to protect your business, you can make your business dreams a reality.