Mistakes Businesses Keep Making

Does anyone run their own business or play a pivotal role in one without wanting it to be awesomely successful …. Profitable, enjoyable, meaningful, great place to work, sensible hours, not overly stressful? Surely we all have those goals, in one way or another.

To be helpful, below is a list of the biggest mistakes privately owned businesses just keep making, according to our experience with so many around Australia throughout this year.

1. Key decision makers work hard but they don’t think hard . So, the business is short on new ideas, innovation and change. It’s actually such an intellectual and practical contradiction … wanting a business to be much better but not spending enough time thinking about how to achieve it all.
2. Businesses are still too influenced by older guys , many of whom haven’t even noticed that there are entirely new ways to run businesses (across the world). The key decision makers are still, too often, those who have been promoted through some type of system or have been there long enough, rather than opening up input to the (very) young, females, different cultures, divergent thinkers and entrepreneurs.
3. Poor choice of people, including equity partners (not just staff) . Businesses recruit people in the hope they will spend years producing quality work but spend around 10 hours selecting them … absurd.
4. Not getting rid of the poor choices of people quickly (with integrity, but swiftly). They wait to see if things will change when their senses are clearly telling them they won’t.
5. Not looking for new business opportunities . This does not mean new leads or new clients for the existing business but looking for alternative or additional business opportunities. It is now easier than ever to try new ideas, with the power of the social media, digital marketing, online everything and working through technology rather than in bricks and mortar.
6. Allowing people who have ran out of steam to continue in pivotal roles . No … move them sideways or out.
7. Sticking to old style marketing methods rather than digital marketing . Is it believable that so many businesses still have poor websites (and don’t even know it) and have no idea how to make them work for the business … and that’s just the tip of the iceberg … what about the power of the social media?
8. Putting infrastructure and resources in place ahead of getting the revenue, and therefore putting costs in place without cash inflow. That might seem like good planning but tell your bank and your family that.
9. Charging too little for what is provided to the customer (and therefore becoming resource, profit and cashflow poor). You’re not too expensive unless target customers are rejecting you. That’s not greedy or unfair; it’s astute business. Resource poor is one of the main reasons so many business owners and key people have to work so hard.
10. Lack of written agreements and making sure that those that do exist are comprehensive, expertly written and upto date. For example, shareholders agreement, agreements with suppliers / customers, even staff.
11. Tolerating accountants who do little more than a yearly tax return rather than actually partner the business to its desired success.
12. Not knowing what they don’t know … and this is more prominent now than ever … because change is happening at a zillion kms an hour.
13. Attempting to please the customer according to what the customer thinks they want . Apple, Google, Netflix, Airbnb, Amazon, Foxtel, Uber and many other very successful businesses didn’t ask that. They asked “what will the customer buy if we produce it?” As Henry Ford said “If I had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”. Think about what the customer may go for (including what has never been supplied or invented) and ask if there are opportunities there .. rather than just being stuck in trying to maximize customer satisfaction according to today’s parameters.
14. Not sacking clients or saying no to them . All customers deserve respect but they can not be allowed to dictate to business to the point of downgrading profitability and workplace satisfaction.
15. Not properly considering moving (parts of) internal technology to the cloud , thinking that what is housed ‘by us’ is more secure. Classic ‘don’t know what you don’t know.
16. Still engaging such old style methodology to run and improve the business … old hat meetings and conferences, statements about Mission/Vision/Values that are just that, business plans that turn out to be just words on paper, strategic plans that look lovely, performance reviews that achieve no uplift in performance, Board meetings that are reporting bodies and little else. Blah blah blah. It has to be way more adventurous than any of that to have an outstanding business.
17. They get good ideas and fail to ever implement them … they remain just good ideas.