8 Startup Mistakes to Avoid When Launching a New Business

Although starting a business will undoubtedly
be hard work, it can be one of the most exciting
and rewarding adventures of your life—if you can
avoid these crippling startup mistakes. You get to
bring your ideas to life. Build your team and
structure your business any way you wish.
However, since building a business is new to you,
learning from the business mistakes other
entrepreneurs have made in the past can help save
you a lot of time and frustration for the weeks,
months and years to come.
You're not alone either. Some of the world's most
successful entrepreneurs—ranging from Richard
Branson to Mark Cuban, Arianna Huffington, Tony
Robbins and more, have made massive missteps
along their path to eventual success. It's only
through learning from their mistakes and heeding
the advice of other more experienced mentors that
they were able to eventually achieve their biggest
goals.
From my own experience and that of others, here
are the 8 biggest, most avoidable startup mistakes
that many entrepreneurs continue to make when
building a new business.
1. Trying to Do Everything Yourself
There are only 24 hours in a day. If you want to
get a good night’s sleep, which is absolutely
necessary to performing at peak levels, the reality
is that you can’t do everything yourself. Although
being a one-person-show may be a functional
necessity in the beginning, you may want to
consider delegating simple tasks to a small team of
contract workers who can help lighten your load—
and free up more of your time for focusing on the
activities only you can do within your business.
Delegating can be a challenge, though. Others may
not perform tasks the same way you would, but
sometimes that’s okay. For example, you may like
to move the furniture in the office when you
vacuum, but your employees don’t. You need to ask
yourself if delegating the task of vacuuming and
allowing a little more dust to accumulate behind
the printer is worth freeing up some of your time
so you can focus on more important things.
2. Not Enforcing Accountability or Punctuality
If you’ve ever had a team member or contract
employee consistently show up late to meetings
and you’ve never held them accountable, you’re
telling the rest of your team that it’s acceptable to
always be late. That's a dangerous precedent to set.
Many business owners don’t want to be the “bad
guy” and enforce punctuality or accountability, but
those are the cornerstones for a growing successful
business with people who feel responsible to
deliver results across the company. Consistently
being late shows people that you are unreliable
and have no respect for yourself or other people’s
time. If you’re an entrepreneur trying to grow a
team that's invested in the future of your company,
be sure to set the standard for your employees so
they have an example to model from.
3. Starting a Business You Have No Genuine Interest
In
No matter how much time and energy you put into
your business, if you’re not truly interested in
what you do—the problem you're solving, the
people you're helping—you won’t get very far.
You have to care deeply about what you' re creating
and who you're building it for, in order to push
past the inevitable obstacles that'll come your way
as an entrepreneur.
If you’ve ever wondered why entrepreneurs like
Richard Branson and Perry Marshall are extremely
successful, it’s not because they found a winning
formula and they certainly didn't just get lucky one
day. They've accomplished incredible feats and
changed industries because they fundamentally
care about what their businesses are helping their
customers do on a daily basis. If you want to be
successful, you have to be deeply involved with
your customers.
4. Becoming Too Absorbed in the Details
Details can be important, but there is a point when
you need to accept the fact that perfect isn ' t worth
it, in order to move forward and continue making
progress with your business. In the beginning,
your business is not going to be perfect, and you’ll
be working out the kinks even with fundamentals
for a while as you get comfortable with the niche
you're operating in and the customers you're
working with.
If you get stuck trying to perfect something before
you can further develop your business and make
sure you're solving real problems your customers
actually have, you’ll never get anywhere. There are
of course some details that can't be skipped when it
comes to your finances, sales funnels, lead
capturing and customer relations. But if you’re a
startup and you’re postponing designing your
website because you can’t decide between two
shades of blue for your typography, it would serve
you well to make any choice for the short-term,
move forward with designing your website and
revisit your colors later when it's the right time to
care about a decision like that (hint: that probably
won't be for many years).
5. Building an Expensive Website on Day One
Speaking of building websites, the last thing you
want to do as a startup is spend a lot of time and
money building a fancy, flashy website before you
even know exactly how to best serve your
customers. One of the best early decisions you can
make as an entrepreneur is to launch a basic
website in the beginning so people have a way to
learn about your product or service and contact
you. That's it.
Here's why: If your business is still being
developed and you invest a ton of your time and
financial resources into building your ultimate
website before your business is even out into the
marketplace, you’ll just end up having to redo the
majority of your work anyway. The reality of
starting a business is that some of your
assumptions will be incorrect—you'll have to grow,
adapt and change in order to best meet the needs
of your customers.
6. Consistently Rebranding a Product That Isn’t
Selling
This is the biggest startup mistake you can make as
an entrepreneur. You may have seen this happen
with other people’s products. Something isn’t
selling, so they change the name and put it in a
new package. It still doesn’t sell.
If you have a product that isn’t selling very well
regardless of how you package it, it may not be
your product that is the problem. You’re either
marketing a perfectly good product to the wrong
people, or you’re marketing to the right people in
the wrong way—there could be something wrong
with your pricing, the value propositions you're
pitching or otherwise.
No matter how much you like the clever name you
came up with, if your product or service doesn’t
appeal to your target market, they won’t buy it. It
takes time to have conversations with real
customers, gather a significant amount of customer
data, interpret that data, and do a great job
of defining your target audience, but it is worth the
effort. You don't immediately launch perfect
solutions—you have to work with your target
customers to create the best version of what they
need.
7. Taking on Unnecessary Expenses
It’s a luxury to have an office, a new computer, a
fax machine, and a double monitor setup. But that
doesn’t mean you need these things in the
beginning. If you're starting up by yourself or you
only have a few employees and they are happy to
work remotely from home, then it doesn’t make
sense to incur the additional costs of renting an
office space.
If your current computer setup is perfectly
functional, you don’t need to replace it just yet. All
of the goodies you want to purchase will come in
time, but in the beginning it’s smart to be frugal
and only spend money on activities that have a
direct positive return in terms of new revenue
coming into the company.
8. Allowing Employees to Use Personal Laptops for
Work
It’s easy to let employees perform their work on
personal laptops because that means you don’t
have to buy them one, but in the long run this is a
big startup mistake.
While many businesses do this, there are quite a
few cons to this practice. Allowing your employees
to primarily use their own personal laptops for
work means that they'll accumulate passwords,
save sensitive documents and other materials
belonging to the business that they'll have access to
when they eventually leave the company.
Turning the Mistakes of Others Into Wisdom
While making mistakes can be beneficial at times
(if you truly retain the important lessons), you
don’t have to experience them all yourself.
If you’re willing to put in the time and effort to
build a solid foundation for your business, work
directly with your customers to create meaningful
solutions for them and heed the wisdom from
others who've forged their own path of
entrepreneurship, you’ll be successful with your
startup.