Anyone who has started a business will tell you that it is no easy feat. As a new entrepreneur, you’ll make mistakes along the way. Some will be small; however, some could prove quite costly.

There’s nothing I can do to help you with the workload challenges – there’s no getting around that. I can, however, provide you with some pointers on how to avoid some of the most common mistakes made by people starting a new business.

Not Spending Enough Time Planning

Many entrepreneurs get a good idea, come up with a basic business plan and then plow ahead not fully thinking through every possible scenario. While it’s rather difficult to plan for every occurrence, you should make every effort to plan for most and to make projections for several years ahead if you can. That way, you will have a clear vision, a path to follow and something to fall back on should things go awry.

Hiring a Franchise Consultant

If you’re looking to go the franchise route as a means of starting a business, you might be thinking about hiring a franchise consultant. If so, consider reading this piece by The Franchise King® first. The more information you have at the start helps to minimize the possibilities of needless, but costly mistakes later.
Not Investing in Your Website

You’ve probably already discovered that it’s fairly easy to create a website. Many people are claiming to have there’s up and running in a matter of minutes using tools such as Shopify and Squarespace. Many new business owners think that they can get away with not investing much time and money into their websites. This is a huge mistake because, although the results with such tools can be pretty decent, they are all pretty standard in appearance and if you want to stand out right now, you need your website to be as unique as possible. Investing in a custom web design, decent graphics, and excellent webs content will be beneficial to your company’s success, so if possible be sure to budget for it.

Hiring the Wrong Team

This is a mistake that can prove to be quite expensive in the long-term because hiring people can be quite costly. You have to recruit candidates, interview them and pay them in accordance with the law. If you choose wrong, you’ll have to pay to get rid of them and then pay to go through the whole process again. Not only that but if your staff aren’t as competent as they really should be, then your business won’t be as good as it should be, which could make it difficult for you to get things off the ground. Even if you’re just hiring freelance staff, where you can bypass many of the above costs, it really does pay to do your due diligence and pick the most effective people for the job.

Improperly Pricing

Another potentially very costly mistake is not pricing your products and services correctly. If you price too high, few people are going to be tempted to buy, but if you price too low, you could end up losing money. That’s why it’s imperative that you sit down and calculate exactly how much it will cost you to provide one unit of whatever it is you’re selling and how much you will need to charge to not only cover it but also to give yourself a fair profit. It’s also worth looking at your competition where it makes sense, so you can ensure that your pricing is competitive for the customer as well as being fair to you.

Being a Perfectionist

Okay, so there is nothing wrong with striving for perfection per se, but when you put off acting until you have created the perfect product or come up with the perfect idea, then it is definitely a bad thing. All you need is for your stuff to be good before you get started. You can always improve your offerings as time goes by, but if you keep putting off that launch, it might never happen. This article at Entreprenur.com is pretty good at illustrating the problem. So, please, don’t let perfection stop you from doing what you really need to do.

Not Being Up to Date With Your Knowledge

For example, if you’re setting up a shoe store, then you need to be up to date in the latest fashion in footwear. If you’re starting a new business offering SEO services, you should be up to date with the best practices of the day. These are no-brainers, but they are things that many entrepreneurs simply do not comprehend. Even if you are a businessperson, you should be continuing your education; in fact, it’s pretty essential that you do if you want your company to be successful and stay relevant.

Not Hiring Attorneys

When you’re starting a new business, you need to ensure that you’re complying with the law in every state/country you operate in. That means you really do need to pay for a business law attorney, at a minimum. If you fail to do so, you could open yourself to litigation and be put out of business before you ever really get started.

If you can avoid, at least, making these mistakes, you will give your new business the best possible chance of doing well in the future, and you probably won’t be one of the nine out of ten new businesses that fail in their first year of operation.

When starting a business acknowledge from the onset that you don’t know everything,  be unafraid to ask for help and surround yourself with wise folks who want to see you win. Good luck!

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