With Prime Minister Modi’s statement of calling startups the backbone of the Indian economy and Shark Tank coming to India a lot of startups are starting to emerge all over the country. These startup owners range from MBA graduates from prestigious colleges to housewives who want to start earning on their own.
As we all know that startups are very tricky to manage and what’s even trickier is to run them successfully. In this competitive environment, it is very tough for a startup to thrive. You cannot afford to make mistakes that can be avoided. This post includes five mistakes that every startup makes which might lead to its downfall.
- 1. Failing to create a business plan
As a startup owner, you should put extreme importance into creating a business plan for your startup. It not only gives the startup a clear direction to go into but it is also needed while funding the startup as banks need a business plan to sanction the loan for your business. It also helps you in calculating the risk factor in your startup and devising a strategy to tackle them accordingly. As a startup, we know you have a limited amount of money to expend, which is why keeping track of your expenses becomes necessary.
- Hiring the wrong personnel
It is a very common mistake among startups to hire irrationally. It includes hiring unqualified and under qualified individuals, hiring more people than necessary, hiring less to save expenses, and hiring people from their family and friends. It is necessary to understand that doing all this during the start of your business will hinder its progress. As a startup owner, you should know how many people you should hire and at what positions. Do not try to save by hiring under qualified people but hiring a smaller number of experts. Hiring experts for work that you won’t be doing yourself will make it easier to accomplish.
- Not setting SMART goals
As a startup owner, you should know how to set goals for your startup. Your startup will not earn 100K profit in a month, which is why it is important to set realistic and achievable goals in a specific time frame. It will give a vision to your startup as well as the employees working under you. The startup goal should not be vague like “reaching a larger audience”, but you should be able to put it in numbers and data such as number of views, number of website visits, number of followers, etc. Give your employees specific targets to achieve.
- Failing to market
You may have this very useful and very efficient product that you are selling but you are still not making any profit with it. The problem here is “Marketing”. Your product will make as much profit as it is known to the people who will be using it. To do this you need to market it to let people know of its existence. Devising proper marketing and sales strategy should be the first step you think about while developing a business plan. You should know how to market your product to maximize the profit of your company.
- Not asking the expert
Experts are called experts for a reason. There are startup owners who have tried to do everything on their own and have failed miserably. Now, we are not saying that it is not possible but as a beginner, you might make a mistake that could’ve been avoided if you’ve just listened to an expert. We know that you have a lot of expenses and that you are low on budget but if you can avoid a greater loss but pay 1/10th of it as a fee to an expert wouldn’t it be a lot better?
These were some of the mistakes that you might make while running a startup or if you are already running one and think that you are doing something wrong it is time that you change it. It is high time that you learn from others’ mistakes rather than doing it yourself and then learning.
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