10 easy ways to fail as an entrepreneur

By Sue Rutherford
Many people dream of starting their own businesses and becoming financially independent, but while the idea of organising and operating your own business venture may be thrilling, there’s a good chance that your fledgling company won’t survive unless you identify potential pitfalls and plan to circumnavigate them.

Here are 10 ways that you could fail as an entrepreneur:

1. Poor market research

Make sure there’s a need for your product or service. Ideally, your offering should be unique and fill a gap in the market, but if there’s already competition in your intended sector, research ways to position yourself uniquely to improve your chances of success.

2. Inadequate planning

Every new business needs a roadmap to follow, a solid business plan. Unless you’re looking for outside funding, this doesn’t have to be a long, formal document, but it must at least outline the operational and financial directions that your business will take. On the flip-side, be flexible. Don’t allow a business plan to stifle your business if circumstances change.

3. Lack of experience

Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur. If you aren’t a proven self-starter with a good track record in planning, organising and making decisions that can benefit your business in the long term, seek out experienced mentors and hire people who can compensate for your lack of expertise in certain areas.

4. Insufficient capital

It’s very common for entrepreneurs to misjudge how much they need for start-up capital, and how long it will take before their new business becomes profitable. This is usually because of inadequate planning and research. If you’re going to look for outside funding, choose investors who are familiar with both your industry sector and the challenges facing new business owners.

5. Over projecting sales volumes

Unless sufficient research is undertaken, you may very well miscalculate the size of your market. This will result in you over-projecting your portion of it and make meeting your subsequent sales objectives an impossible task. Furthermore, your cost projections will be too low and your end margins won’t be what you anticipated.

6. Feeble financial systems

Make sure you implement solid financial systems that will scale with your business, right from the start. There are many first-rate software packages you can make use of to keep your finances running smoothly. If you’re unfamiliar with good accounting practices then consider enlisting the services of a bookkeeper to help you on a regular basis.

7. Mismanaging cash-flow

Lack of financial discipline is a common cause for start-ups to fail. Cash is the life-blood of any business and learning to manage cash-flow correctly is critical. Keep a close eye on your debtors’ list and spend your income wisely. It may be very tempting to splash out on expensive resources, but before doing so, take an inventory of what you already have and be realistic about whether or not your new purchases are essential to the success of your business.

8. Unexpected growth

Planning for the potential growth of your business is just as important as planning for a shortfall in expectations. Failure to do this could be extremely damaging as growth periods are often unstable and confusing. Whether you’re increasing your market share or diversifying, you need a strategy to cope with expansion whilst still fulfilling your existing customers’ requirements.

9. Hiring the wrong people

At some stage in the development cycle of your business you’re probably going to have to employ people. Choose wisely and never hire for the sake of convenience as hiring the wrong people can seriously undermine the success of your business. You need to select people who, at the very least, meet your skill and behavioural trait requirements. Hiring experienced staff that you can trust will provide you with valuable support.

10. Fear of failure

To be a successful entrepreneur, you must be willing to accept failure. Unfortunately, fear of failure keeps many people from taking the necessary risks required to start and grow a successful business venture. To work through your fear, take a realistic look at your business, correct any problems that you’ve identified and then take action and move on.
Failure may be painful, but it can also be your best teacher if you are willing to spend time analysing your mistakes and applying what you learn from them.

Starting and running your own business means that you are in control of the process. While there are no guarantees, if you plan carefully, work hard, remain flexible and avoid the pitfalls mentioned above, you have a very good chance of becoming a successful entrepreneur and fulfilling your dreams of financial independence.

Have fun out there.

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6 reasons why the iPad will be the magazine’s saviour

8 April

By Matthew Buckland

The web has never really been a good fit for the glossies. Their luxurious, ample layouts have not really translated effectively to the web. Advances in web technology and connectivity have resulted in a more multimedia-friendly web - we’re in the broadband era, Flash is on its 10th version, and YouTube is the world’s 3rd biggest site. Yet magazines just aren’t nearly as prominent as their online newspaper counterparts. We can guess why. Maybe it’s because the web started out predominantly as a text-based platform and, like it or not, that legacy shapes today’s paradigm? Perhaps it’s because the web is mostly still a work-based medium, whereas magazines are an after-hours, leisure-time read? Perhaps it’s to do with the fact that magazines are generally monthlies or weeklies – they just don’t have the volumes of content that news sites do on what is a demanding, immediate and dynamic medium.

So enter the iPad. It could be the solution (or saviour) to a medium that has so far been somewhat of a conundrum for magazines.

Here are the six reasons why magazines should rejoice about the iPad:*

1. The iPad is a leisure device:

Magazines are leisure reads. The iPad is supposed to be our “third device”, an internet and multimedia device we use while relaxing on the couch in front of the TV after work and on weekends. This is different from our “first device”, the work computer or laptop, which is filled with reminders, distractions and associations about work. This type of leisure-time usage fits perfectly with most magazine consumption, which primarily happens out of work hours.

2. Apple app store has a successful payment model:

We know how hard it’s been for newspapers and magazines to find workable online business models. It seems that online advertising is not cutting it in a significant way. The jury is still out (for a rather long break) on whether users want to pay for content online. It’s not about the price, because those same users will spend the equivalent of a whole year’s online content subscription in a corner pub in less than a week. It’s psychological: it has to do with the laws of scarcity and abundance. Why pay when there’s the perception and/or the reality that similar content is freely accessible elsewhere online via thousands of equivalents? Enter the app store, where there’s an accepted payment model in a high-quality walled garden. People are paying for apps. People will pay for magazine apps.

3. The glossy iPad interface is a good fit with a glossy magazine:

The iPad is about the size of an A4 page, and therefore a perfect fit for magazine content and advertising. A luxurious, graphically-rich magazine layout would work well on the ample, silky smooth Apple iPad screen. We have a digital experience that not only matches, but betters, the offline experience in terms of design and usability because it’s now interactive. This has not quite been the case when we look at the magazine experience on the traditional desktop web. We’re not saying we want an identical magazine experience on the iPad, because that would just be one very big failure of imagination. Rather, we are saying we want a similar experience to the offline one that readers and advertisers are familiar and comfortable with. In fact, I predict iPad magazine apps, ironically, will in layout look and feel more similar to their print versions. Is this convergence nirvana?

4. Portability:

In many ways this is an obvious point, but one worth exploring. Much like a magazine, the iPad is highly-portable. On a portability scale, your PC desktop computer is at the one end and your paper magazine at the other. In between, you’d find your iPad, your laptop and your netbook. The iPad is more portable than most laptops as it is thinner, lighter and easier to move around. There are fewer wires and cords to worry about, and the battery life is advertised at being around 10 hours.

5. Access to an international audience:

Many topics most leisure magazines cover are universal. The glossies often cover issues such as love, sex, marriage, life and work. The savvier magazines will create both local and international iPad apps with their content in order to attract a much larger international audience, monetised via a contextual advertising network model.

6. Distribution and marketing:

Apple’s app store assists with distribution and marketing of your newly-created iPad magazine app. Your magazine is not out there in the great nowhere of the wild, world wide web, but in a tight ecosystem where the right type of readers will find it. This is the same audience that consumes books and are buying them in the Apple iBookStore – likely readers of magazines too.

The gorilla in the room, of course, is the question of just how many iPads are likely to be in use and how long is the road to saturation? In most emerging markets we’re probably looking at access by an elite audience only – at least in the beginning.

You could take the view that members of this elite are the all-important early adopters and influencers in society which could determine future consumption. It also depends on your target market. Perhaps you have a magazine with an international strategy that plays predominantly in the high-end iPad market. If this is the case, you should jump in now. But if your magazine is aimed at a broader market, perhaps you should wait a bit – or at least diversify. This means create an app related to your magazine, but with content and services that would appeal to a tech-savvy, elite market.

* For the purposes of this article I’ve limited the discussion to leisure magazines, excluding news and business magazines, of which some of the points may or may not apply.

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Mobile West vs Mobile Rest

Mobile is the next big thing.
Have you heard that before? I have. In fact lately that is all I’ve heard from every direction and every guru or evangelist out there. And I use the words guru and evangelist very, very loosely.

Trying to figure out why everyone is saying that mobile is the next best thing.  Everyone is talking about mobile, but no one is being specific. All the big guns: TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, TheNextWeb and many others have constantly been batting around mobile ideas, thoughts and concepts over the past 12 months, but none coherent, complete or steadfast. There is lots of talk, very little action, and even less knowledge floating around from the web-savvy smarts.

This is a new world. This is an emerging world and it is the emerging markets that are taking it on headfirst.[...]  Click on the headline link to read the full article on matthewbuckland.com

The end of the website

Posted: 05 Apr 2010 04:05 PM PDT

Having been involved in this industry for a very long time, I have the benefit of a long and wide perspective of the business of making the web. This sometimes narrows my thinking, and I have been accused, for example, of not recognising the importance of mobile, or the revolution that is social media. However, [...]
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