A large percentage of small businesses fail within its first few years, however we can avoid it by understanding these things:
- Bad time management: This can be a significant reason for business failure. Many people are unable to make a smooth transition from being employees to small business owners. Suddenly, things have changed drastically and they are no longer pressured with deadlines. They have become their own bosses, but they can actually be an undisciplined boss. Now, they have more time to visit local park, watch DVD, play with pets and binge watch TV series. There are so many tempting distractions at home and it is often easy to subconsciously treat home business as a second priority. Like any business, we couldn’t get good results, unless we are concentrate ourselves properly in the work. A good way to do this is by breaking up our day work into separate chunks, perhaps 90-minute segments. Our aim should be to focus to one task for each segment and we should be able to give it our full undivided attention. There would be distractions that can lure us away and those TV shows can be quite addictive. However, we should pay no attention, because our financial future is much more important. We could take 10-minute rest when a segment ends. We could walk outside for five minutes and eat some light snack on the porch. But, then we should come straight back to start the next 90-minute segment. It is important to maintain the 7 or 8 productive hours each day. This will take some time, but we will become more disciplined and we are able to get more things done.
- Lack of goals: It is important to set proper goals. They are often an overlooked tool and it is not possible to get things done without goals. When starting home-based business, we should have our goals and our ability to follow through with them could determine our success. Without regular goals, our business will have no real directions. Our business could begin with a general idea on how to accomplish specific goals and this will be difficult to do if we don’t have real targets. We should write down our goals the night before and it is easy to see how our productivity starts to increase. This will improve our motivation and sense of accomplishment.
- No mentor: Information is actually the most valuable thing in the world. With the best and most accurate information, even a poor businessperson could become at least moderately successful. We should look for mentors, but it is important to be more cautious and avoid self-proclaimed gurus who give us second-grade advices. Good mentors will tell us good ways of doing things and scammers could take advantage of our naivety. As an example, those so-called experts could ask for payment to submit out website to major search engines, although this task can be performed manually in just a few minutes. We should ask other successful professionals for trusted mentors who can give us the best results.