Bitter. Discouraged. And defeated. Those words pretty much sum up how you felt days ago when your business startup fell to the gutters. And now, not only are you in bad shape emotionally, but your finances are also looking just as dire because of all the debts you incurred from trying to keep your business afloat. You then say to yourself, “Life can be scary at times. So scary.” I don’t doubt you for one second. However, I assure you, that you are not the first to have experienced such adversities. Business owners who have achieved an exceptional level of success tend to have their rags to riches stories to share too. What makes them different; however, is that they keep on learning from their experiences and they never give up.
Allow me to share with you 4 mindsets that you absolutely need to avoid, if you’re looking to keep your business from flopping.
- You don’t need marketing. Create a stunning product and your customers will come barging at your doorsteps.
These are some of the things that you managed to cross out on your checklist:
- Can my product solve my audience’s problems? Does it provide real value? Check.
- Is my product more affordable than most of my competitors’? Check.
- Is my product durable enough? Check.
- Do I have a highly trained customer support team in case my customers need help with my products? Check.
You feel confident, you feel excited, you are almost 100% sure your customers will come knocking at your doorsteps throwing their money to you once your product goes live.
In short, for you – victory is near. Very near. So much so that you didn’t bother to market your product. After all, considering how amazing your product is, people will surely catch wind of it, right?
A few days after, your product goes live. That’s when it hit you… no one ever went to buy your product! The same product that can solve your audience’s problems, and the same product that’s more affordable than your competitors.
“What on earth is going on?” you then ask yourself.
Panic then starts to kick in…
Friends, a lot of business startup owners have fallen for the same mistake. Thinking that a product can market itself if its quality is good enough is a terrible mistake. With how noisy the world has become due to the internet, there’s a good chance that your audience will never hear about your product, no matter how amazing it is.
According to Worldometers, there are about 3.1 million articles or so published daily. With that kind of noise, do you really still think that your product can market itself?
- You don’t need to train your team now. It can come later once you have enough budget for it.
“The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them.” – Zig Ziglar
When your team lacks training, you’ll end up doing a lot of fire fighting, instead of focusing on growing your startup. If you think spending for your team’s training is expensive, wait till you start losing clients due to your team’s lack of know-how. Remember, when your business is just starting, the last thing you want to happen is for your clients to start disappearing.
You need to nurture your relationship with your clients, sweep them off their feet with your out-of-this-world quality service, and show them how much you value them. In case you haven’t figured it out, all of which I described are things that only a highly trained professional can do. Besides, you don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on training, the way large corporations do – at least not right now. Just opt for training materials that your team absolutely can’t live without.
You can also conduct refresher trainings by yourself, or you can task someone from your team to do it. That way, you won’t have to pay other companies to conduct the training.
- The cheaper the better. Hiring based on the lowest bidding applicant.
One of the challenges that startups needs to contend with is the fact that they don’t have much wiggling room in terms of their finances. Because startups have a limited budget, the founders tend to hire applicants that bid the lowest hourly rate, thinking that they can save on labor costs.
#BigMistake!
Putting together a team based on who the most affordable applicants are can cause all sorts of problems to your company. For one thing, you’d end up having a group of ragtag individuals that have different goals and ideals. You’d have a fruit salad-like team that has no sense of cohesiveness whatsoever.
With that kind of culture (if you can call it one), unnecessary conflict and fire fighting would surely arise that can prove to be detrimental to your business’ success.
- If you need to get things done, you need to do it yourself.
“The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Thinking that you need to do everything yourself if you want to get things done can kill whatever chance of scalability your business has. Because with that kind of setup, your team will never get their needed opportunity to grow.
They’ll only be handling the less critical things (often times the boring ones) since you want to do the important stuff yourself. Stop doing that, will you? Stop hurting yourself, and your team. Remember that business success is all about people.
You need to empower them. You need to help them grow to become the best they can. There’s just no other way to do it. Because if you’ll think about it, the more you limit your team and put them in a box, the more you will keep on doing the important tasks by yourself, causing you to feel burned out. You’ll then feel frustrated with your business because you aren’t experiencing the freedom that you thought you’d have once you reach the next level.
What’s next?
Are there wrong business mindsets that you feel should be added on the list? If you answered that question with a “yes”, then please share your ideas in the comments section below.
