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Common Mistakes for a New Business - part 1
As mentioned a bit earlier, at least 80% of new businesses fail within their first year of being open. There are many reasons why businesses tend to fail, and it is best to list them here so that you can try to avoid making these common mistakes when you open your own business.
Advertising
Many new businesses fail to advertise properly. It wouldnt occur to most business owners that insufficient advertising might cause a problem with keeping their business afloat, but during tough times, advertising might be your best weapon.
When the economy is running badly, you should have enough money put aside to advertise special promotions and sales to your customers. When you do advertise, you should try to be everywhere. You want people to see your businesses name no matter where they turn.
Here are some of the ways that you can advertise to ensure that cannot be forgotten:
Newspaper and magazine ads
Newspaper and direct mailbox inserts
Flyers and posts
Commercial and media ads
Websites, complete with online store
You should know that advertising does not need to cost you an arm and a leg. Commercials can be costly, but these others dont have to be. Running a website can be free or cheap, and the software to host your own online store can also be cheap or free. You just need someone that can keep track of orders for you.
Improper advertising can leave the community not knowing that your business exists -- especially during hard times. You want to stay available to all of your customers because if you disappear from view, so will your customers.
Improper Bookkeeping
It doesnt matter what you do to keep your business running at its best. If you do not keep proper track of your monies coming and goings, you will eventually be left with none.
If it is at all possible, do your own bookkeeping so that you know exactly where your money is going. If you do not know much about it, you should hire someone that does, but also someone that you can trust. If you must, hire someone just to watch the bookkeeper so that you dont get ripped off.
As the business owner, you need to know exactly how much money that your business has. You should know exactly how much profit you are gaining each month so that you can use your money wisely. It is not always easy to keep track of all of your money, especially if you are generating a lot of business, but it doesnt have to be impossible.
Even with a good book keeper, you should look into popular accounting software like Quickbooks and Microsoft Money because they do most of the work for you. All you really have to do yourself is add the right numbers and let the software add and subtract for you.
Every year many businesses go under due to bad book keeping. They spend money they dont have or they make errors processing payroll deposits. Dont let this happen to you.
When considering where you can improve keep in mind that the greatest cost to your business is in hidden costs and that this will contribute largely to poor quality, over all. How much do you know about your target customers? Once you have brought your customer into your shop, you now have a golden opportunity to use your clever sales skills and techniques. |
