Every business owner, large or small, is afraid of failure.
Can I get this thing off the ground or can I keep this thing up in the air without dropping the ball (or anything in between)?
Maybe you have lots of competition – how can you get noticed AND charge a fair price?
Maybe you’re new to the market – how can you get customers to hear about you and want what you’re offering?
Maybe you’re starting off – how and where do you start, so you can get to break even and above as soon as possible?
Here’s a simple set of rules to help you.
Failure often blindsides us because of:
- Lack of real information (what’s the REAL word out there – what do customers REALLY need)
- Overconfidence (we’re the experts in our business … we know what the customers want (this was a real quote to me from a Marks and Spencer Board member just before their business collapsed into a shadow of what it once was))
- or a simple failure to plan.
Without proper foresight and information, warning signs are ignored until the damage is irreversible.
And this happens time and time again: we see it all the time.
This “surprise” is frequently tied to psychological and systemic blind spots:
- The Planning Paradox: As British businessman Sir John Harvey-Jones famously noted, the “nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise”. While winging it avoids the anxiety of anticipating failure, it leaves you completely unprepared when things go wrong.
- Gradual Decline: In both personal ventures and complex organizations, dysfunction often creeps in slowly. Because the system continues to get by on past momentum, insiders remain completely oblivious to their vulnerability until the whole structure crumbles.
- Confirmation Bias: We tend to focus heavily on data that proves we are on the right track while selectively ignoring “fear-based” warning signs. This debilitates our present readiness and makes the eventual realization a massive shock.
To prevent these problems, try implementing a few structured routines:
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- Customer Focused Mission: this reminds you what your business is REALLY all about: it’s not about you, it’s about what you can do for your past and future customers: that’s all that matters!
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- The customers’ REAL needs: remember: your value is 100% based on the emotional needs you satisfy for the customer, and nothing else. You may be clear on what they are at the moment, but what about in a year’s or 3 tears time?
- Professional objective feedback systems: far better to see where the icebergs are likely to be and take early avoiding action, than to wait until you actually see one about to hit you (or worse, have already hit it!)
- Pre-mortems: Before launching a project, assume it completely failed and work backward to figure out why. This exercise exposes invisible vulnerabilities.
- Routine Audits: Stop relying on past success. Use tools like to objectively evaluate potential points of failure on a regular basis.
The best #systems to do this continually and effectively in your business are the 4 #slowselling systems
Please download our free ebooks from our home page and start implementing these small step by step systems today: there’s no fee to pay to us.
But a MASSIVE long term cost of not doing this…