10 big mistake most afraid of entrepreneurs
1. Insufficient preparation before starting a business
No one can finish a marathon without preparation and training. The same is true of entrepreneurship. Before starting a business, we should first do some warm-up training, including properly adjusting the schedule, paying attention to diet and expanding interpersonal relationships. You should make sure that all aspects of your life are ready, because once you start a business, it will completely occupy and affect your life.
If your family and friends don't know what will happen after starting a business, or don't support you to start a business, it will not only make you suffer from personal feelings, but also distract you from concentrating on starting a business. What you need to do is to communicate with them well before starting a business and win their understanding and support. Before starting a business, you must do a good job in this area, because if this relationship is not handled well, it will have a very adverse impact on your future business.
2. Confuse products and business.
EricHoltzclaw, a serial entrepreneur, said that in today's era when application is king, a product solves a single personalized demand, while the real enterprise business is something that customers can come back and buy repeatedly.
How to distinguish between product and enterprise business? Do you have any other potential sources of income besides the income of consumers buying products for the first time? This is a key point that potential investors attach great importance to. Investors will want to know what you will do next. In addition, they want to make sure that you can provide other things that can help them achieve long-term development besides what you have. Will you license your technology to others? What will this business develop into in the next three to five years? These are all issues that investors are very concerned about, and you can also find out whether you have real business through these issues.
3. Not willing to spend money to hire professionals
As the founder of the company, you can't be good at everything. Everyone has his own shortcomings. All kinds of work in the company need professionals to do, especially in finance and law. COOGregRau of hardware company Ridago said that if the recruitment and investment of talents are not handled properly, it will cause continuous trouble to the future development of the company.
For many important jobs that require professional knowledge, don't always think that you can solve these jobs by yourself in a short time through online self-study. What you have to do is to find professionals in this field to do these jobs. They are definitely better at related work than you. For example, when writing the financing terms, if there is no professional to help you check all the contents in the investment terms list, such as liquidation priority, if the company is sold in the future, you may get nothing as the founder of the company.
4. Ignore the importance of data
LisaStone, co-founder of online women's blog community BlogHer, said that fantasy thinking that is not based on data can destroy any company. You can't just believe you can succeed. You need to analyze some key data to see if you can really succeed. There must be some data or key indicators to verify whether your grand entrepreneurial idea really has a market. Once these data are collected, use these data to establish key performance indicators (KPI) or milestone data to prove that your company's business is developing steadily.
Si Tong has personal experience in this respect. In the early days of BlogHer's development, many people told her and her partners that you couldn't attract enough female members to pay for your annual meeting to pay for your meeting, but the data they collected at the first small test meeting strengthened their confidence in what they could do. Later, more than 300 female members paid to attend their annual meeting, which made the team get a net profit of 60 thousand dollars, which was later invested in the development and operation of the company. Whether it can be successful depends on the data. This is a good example.
5. Expanding too fast
According to a data report released by StartupGenome, 74% of Internet startups in rapid development will fail because of their rapid expansion. ErikRannala, co-founder and managing partner of investment company MuckerCapital, said: This happens very frequently. Many companies feel abundant after financing, so they start to burn money crazily, and a lot of money goes to Hua Cuo. When they realize that spending money too quickly is ineffective, it is often too late. ?
Where did they spend their money? Many places range from marketing expenses to rapid recruitment of a large number of employees. The problem finally boils down to one: a lot of money is wasted on many messy things that are not fundamentally helpful to the company's business. When you spend money, you first need to make sure that there is enough money in the company account, or there is a way to make more money. If you spend all your money before there is any substantial breakthrough in the company's business, then your next financing will become very difficult.
6. Stick to the wrong idea
You must realize that sometimes you climb the wrong mountain, and sometimes you are trying to knock down a wall that you will never knock down. In the process of starting a business, you can't be the one who hits the south wall and doesn't look back. People who start their own businesses for the first time and those who start their own businesses in unfamiliar markets are very likely to make this mistake. They are so obsessed with their original idea of starting a business that they can't realize in time that this idea is no longer feasible.
Don't be too stubborn, seek truth from facts, speak with evidence and verify whether your products meet the market demand. You can test which strategy is the best way to attract users. You can track and calculate the cost of acquiring users, and you can also observe which adjustments will increase or decrease the acquisition cost of users. For consumer internet companies, there are five or six effective ways to acquire users that have been verified by the market. For these methods, if you try for half a year to a year and still can't see the effect, it means that your company's business is likely to be problematic.
7. I don't know how to authorize.
One of the most common management mistakes made by founders of startup companies is that they want to do everything themselves, and they do everything themselves, and they don't know how to authorize and entrust. This behavior was understandable at that time. Most successful founders are very strategic, and they don't want to worry too much about whether many details of the company have been completed.
Learning to authorize is what founders must learn. At the beginning, you can do a set of workflow, similar to a work guide, telling everyone how to do things in the right way. With this process, as the founder, you will not feel uncomfortable because of decentralization, and the employees of the company will have rules to follow. If you don't do that and want to do everything yourself, you will feel overwhelmed and eager to recruit more people, and then you won't authorize others to share your work, so you will never get rid of this state. Therefore, we must learn to decentralize.
8. Think that money can solve all problems.
Many struggling entrepreneurs will think that all their problems can be solved as long as they successfully get the next round of financing. However, money is not everything, and not all problems can be solved with money. Carter Caster, a professor of business management at Kellogg School of Management of Northwest University and a partner of venture capital company, believes that money cannot solve the fundamental problems existing in the company's business model.
If there is a problem with your business model, spending too much money on it will not solve the problem. You need to solve this problem before financing. If you do the opposite, you will only get into greater trouble.
9. Underestimated the time required for sales.
Sales takes time, and entrepreneurs must understand this. Many entrepreneurs think that it takes only three to six months to get a big customer, but in fact, it usually takes more than one year. If your business plan underestimates the time required for sales, then you are sure to get into trouble.
A sale needs to go through many processes. The top management, line managers, technicians and product managers of an enterprise need to go through the examination and approval at the above levels if they want to complete a sale, and there will be a process from inspection to decision-making to implementation. I found that the reason why many companies finally have the problem of broken capital chain is to underestimate the time period required for sales.
10. Fear of failure
Failfast is a very popular phrase in the entrepreneurial circle. But TarekKamil doesn't like it. No matter how entrepreneurs beautify failure, failure. It is still a frightening word, and no one wants to be the antonym of success. This statement is problematic because? Failure? It means that you have got nothing, but in many cases it is not. You need to change your mind. You didn't fail. You just did an experiment. Although you will get hurt in every experiment, the lessons you have learned in this experiment will help you to perform better in future entrepreneurship. This is a learning process.
What should college students pay attention to when starting their first business?
First, pay attention to and evaluate their financial ability.
Enterprises are composed of talents, products and funds, and the lack of self-owned funds often leads to the overload of interests of entrepreneurs and the failure of their careers. Therefore, entrepreneurial youth should have the view of "how much can be done with how much effort" and don't borrow too much money to operate.
Second, choose industries carefully.
To start a business, you should choose an industry you are familiar with and proficient in. At first, you can operate on a small scale or cooperate with shareholders, and gradually expand according to the business plan.
Third, there must be long-term planning.
In the development of an enterprise, "stability" is always more important than "growth" Therefore, running a marathon should have endurance and preparation, step by step, and there should be no speculation to grab short-term jobs.
Fourth, seek survival first.
Enterprises should strive for survival before development, lay a solid foundation, and don't aim too high, covet performance and ignore risks. They must attach importance to the essence of management, work step by step, seek to create profits, and then expand their operations.
Five, elite attack
The initial scale of the company must be streamlined, efficient and substantial, and don't blindly pursue superficial glitz to avoid increasing expenses.
Sixth, we must have willpower.
If you have an annual plan, a goal and an ideal, you must have strong patience and willpower to carry it out. The more frustrated, the braver and never stop.
VII. Strategic Alliance
Entrepreneurship should pay attention to strategy, and small enterprises need to form alliances with their peers, that is, besides their own products, they should also promote other related products. Combining related industries with "strategic alliance" can not only improve the attractiveness of products, meet the needs of customers, but also increase their competitiveness and income.
Eight, forward-looking planning
Business philosophy, business policy and business strategy are balanced and meticulous, combining wisdom and strength to lay a good foundation for the enterprise.
Don't follow suit when starting a business.
To start a business, we must be able to persevere, not just catch up with the fashion craze; Entrepreneurship depends not only on the present, but also on the future. We should not only win for a while, but also win for the future!
People in China always like to follow the trend when doing many things, even when starting a business.
Because > when there is a boom, there will naturally be more stores. More stores means fierce competition, and then the market will be saturated, followed by elimination. Poor constitution? Naturally out.
Entrepreneurship should be persistent, and industries that interest you should have their own investigation and analysis. Hot industries often come and go in a hurry. Every period has a popular industry at that time. The industries that are popular now have naturally eliminated the industries that were popular before, and the next industries that are about to become popular will eliminate the industries that are popular now in the future, and so on.
Therefore, in the choice of entrepreneurship, we should abandon fashion and think calmly.
Entrepreneurship depends not only on the present, but also on the future. We should not only win for a while, but also win for the future!
The above are the precautions I provide for college students' entrepreneurship, hoping to help you.
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