1) Not know who the top leaders in their industry are locally or nationally.
How can you compete in a market when you don’t know who you are competing against? Smart business owners do the homework doing the planning stage of their new business.
By completing the research they discover who is doing the best in their industry locally and nationally. New owners will want to understand what the competition is doing right so they know where the benchmark is set for their new business. They will also need to know what the competition is missing in order to enhance their businesses’ offerings.
2) Not getting a Mentor.
Everyone thinks they know how to run a business, but the truth of the matter is, over 90 percent (90%) of people open a business with a great deal of product knowledge and mistakenly think that it is business knowledge.
Not having a mentor maximizes the chances of failing! Not just anyone, but someone who has been doing what the new business owner plans to do and has done it well for more than 6 years. Yes, more than six years. The goal is to find someone who has endured the “five-year death sentence” that has been the final diagnosis of most new businesses.
3) Thinking they can steal the competition’s customers by having a lower price only.
This is the most critical mistake most new business owners make. Why? Because it hurts them more than their competition. By being “cheap,” they cheapen their brand and the value of their product/service. It is hard to recover from cheap.
Yes, luckily, they may get customers at first, but if they have overhead and are forced to raise their prices those customers will flee. Go in smart by using the correct comparable price and win customers by adding value to the existing industry price. When you add value, the new customers will appreciate the additional benefits at the price they are accustomed to paying.