Keep your eye on what’s next.
When you’re trying anything new in life, you’re bound to make mistakes. Unfortunately, when it comes to starting a business, even the smallest misstep can spell doom.
Check out these common startup mistakes and tips for avoiding them:
Playing the lone wolf: It’s hard to start a business on your own. You need a dedicated team to help you get the business off the ground, investors to fund your venture and customer feedback to improve your business model. If you attempt to do everything yourself, you can experience burnout in a short time and make more mistakes because your perspective is limited.
Not building business credit: Just like you have personal credit scores, your company will have business credit scores too. When you’re just starting out, most lenders and creditors will look at your personal credit scores to help them gauge your risk. But, over time, credit bureaus start to create a credit profile based just on your business. These scores and reports can play a key role in determining whether or not you get approved for business financing and other beneficial commercial relationships.
This article can help you learn how to build business credit the right way.
Getting ahead of yourself: Landing funding from one investor is not cause to start scaling your business and hiring a sizable staff. Be realistic about your achievements and don’t take every small success as an indication of long-term growth. Growing the wrong way has sunk many businesses.
Running down the clock: Many people have similar ideas, and it takes your unique angle to make your business profitable. However, others may think of the same angle, which means you need to move fast when an opportunity does arise. This is not to say you should start pitching half-baked business plans to investors, but it does indicate that you shouldn’t put your timeline on hold because you’re nitpicking over small details.
Fearing change: We all have great ideas, but not all of those musings make a great business. Be open to advice from mentors, customers and investors. It’s hard to not love your company, but you must be willing to make improvements when necessary so that your idea doesn’t become another startup that fails to get off the ground.
Many things will change as your startup grows into a stable business. Make sure you’re taking appropriate steps to adapt to those changes and continue expanding.
This article was originally written on January 8, 2015 and updated on November 17, 2016.
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