Whether you’re thinking of starting your own business, or you’re trying to grow your established small businesses, making mistakes is inevitable as we’ve touched on this in our previous blog post 8 harsh truths about starting your own business. The key is to understand, and accept, that making mistakes is part of the journey. The sooner you embrace errors as opportunities, the quicker it will be for your small business to overcome them.
There are a number of common mistakes small business owners make, that can easily be avoided if you take time to consider them before you launch your business: in particular, before you launch any marketing activities to try scale growth
In this blog post, we’ll be taking a look at some examples, to help ensure your small business gets off to a flying start and you avoid some challenges most small businesses will unfortunately face.
Having no clear business strategies in place…
Setting out your business strategy is key to planning what your priorities and goals are. It’s one of the things we drill into our clients through our eBooks and Course. Whenever you’re about to start a new initiative or campaign, it’s important to remember what it is you’re trying to achieve, and how you’re going to measure the success. Often when you’re trying to get a business off the ground you’ll find you mind running away with “great, fun ideas” on how to get your brand out into the world – but often this way of thinking doesn’t bring authentic, sustainable growth. Riding trends are great for growing a social following, but how are you going to turn that following into customers?
Try to always bring your activity back to your strategy – and if something doesn’t support your strategy – try to re-imagine that activity into a way that does. Staying on track, and being brutal with your “priority jobs” is crucial for keeping you focused, and preventing an ever-growing job list of “nice to haves”.
Letting things gather dust!
One of the biggest mistakes small business owners make (especially during the set-up and launch phase) is allowing your small business to gather dust. Often setting up or running a small business starts as a side-hustle so unlike going to your day job – it doesn’t matter if you don’t do anything today. Well if you’re serious about scaling your business or going full-time with self-employment, unfortunately, you’re going to have to put in some effort. We’re not saying you need to do everything right now, just try not to let tasks sit for too long. You want to make creating and developing your business a positive habit – so you enjoy doing it, and you do it frequently. Set yourself clear goals that are achievable. We recommend the S.M.A.R.T goal methodology:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-Bound
Trying to do it all – you may be a small business, but you can ask for help!
As you may have realised by now, when running your small business, you’ll be wearing many hats. Lots of people fail to make the transition from being in employment to being ‘self-employed’ or ‘a small business owner’ because they struggle to prioritise their workflow, and adapt accordingly.. Often individuals are very much used to doing a specific role or task, and that’s it: they’re not used to having to figure things out for themselves. Likewise, it’s important to remember when you need to outsource. Let’s say you need a web developer and you don’t have the time or the skills to complete a task, work towards budgeting and outsourcing that task. It will save you valuable time which could be spent on higher-priority tasks. Furthermore, if you don’t have a budget to play with, then it may be time to call in some favours in the community or start learning!
This may sound obvious but you’d be surprised how many people we’ve worked with who try to take on absolutely everything and very quickly, everything comes tumbling down around them. Your time is money and you should be focusing on the tasks that are within your skillset and will add the most value to your small business.
Things don’t have to be perfect, sometimes having a ‘scrappier’ approach can help move things along quickly.
Neglecting Finances and Budgets!
Did you know that 29% of new businesses fail because they run out of cash?
Common mistakes include not planning for the unknown, unrealistic pricing of products/services and failure to reinvest cash back into the business.
Having said that, by investing in planning, market research, and financial forecasting, you can avoid this from happening to you.
Overspending on your budget and paying yourself too much are only two of many reasons why your budget can quickly disappear. This is where being realistic in your business plan at the outset will literally pay dividends if you excuse the pun!
Relying on Social Media Sales for your small business!
In today’s business world, it’s not enough to just have a social media page!
With over 1.2 billion monthly shopping queries on Google, and a 17.7% year-on-year growth, it’s likely that your potential customers aren’t shopping through social media (well, not usually as a primary channel). We’re not saying that the shopping features on socials aren’t effective by any means, and you may find success with your small business selling in those spaces – but it’s proven that a lot of searches (with intent to research or buy, may we add) happen on search engines.
This means you need a way of expanding your reach past the realms of the newsfeed. Having a good website for example can be a great way of increasing your online presence, brand awareness and subsequently revenue for your small business.
Did you know it has been predicted that the number of e-commerce users will grow to nearly 274 million by 2025? That’s over three times the population of the whole of the United Kingdom!
Likewise, if you’re not quite ready to invest in a resource that can help kick-start your small business, but you want to gain access to free insights, expertise and downloadable resources – you can subscribe to our newsletter by clicking here.