While entrepreneurship is a road commonly tread these days, mistakes are still made. And the first step to avoiding making mistakes is to identify them. So here are 3 common ones!
1) Not having a complete team.
In all start-ups, whether you are delivering a
And that could be a good thing, since all start-ups need to make money to survive. On the flip side however, you are going to need someone who knows their stuff, relevant to your industry to survive. There isn’t any sense in getting four sales guys in a start-up but no software developer on board if you want to make the next Facebook. Sure, you’ll have no problems getting funding, but good luck with actually developing the app.
After all, the key to a successful business(and life) is balance in every aspect.
2) Thinking you can do everything!
Now here’s a big mistake lots of start-ups make. Seemingly simple tasks like making a business logo, laying out the design of a promotional brochure and printing out new name cards, can take a lo more time and cost than expected.
Make sure you hire a freelancer who actually knows how to do branding, graphic design, or copywriting to fill in these niches for you. It may seem like a small matter, but the one thing that all these skills have in common is that you are going to show all these products to your clients.
You need these to be professionally done, and hate it as much as you like, but you aren’t a professional in these areas. Not unless you actually have certifications in them, and I’m not talking about that time you took that one module in University either!
3) Going into flashy but useless partnerships.
Partnerships between start-ups can be a beautiful and wondrous thing, but they can also go horribly awry if both start-up’s partners aren’t exactly sure what each is supposed to do for the other.
If both start-ups have clear objectives on how one can help the other, e.g., Start-up A is great at branding at marketing, but needs technical expertise, which Start-up B has, but lacks brains in the marketing department – this might be a great deal after all!
Neither of these start-ups might actually be big fish in their respective industries, but with competent leaders and clear directives and objectives, great things can happen.
Conversely, if you have Start-up A who is great at social media management, and Start-up B who is great at delivering plumbing services, and it’s a partnership, there are a few ways it could go wrong.
Start-up A might feel that it’s doing a lot more than its getting out of this relationship, since Start-up B can’t actually help them apart from making sure their office plumbing is perfect. Now how is that going to help start–up A grow the business? Maybe Start-up A should transition this into a business relationship and not a partnership. Start-up B on the other hand, of course gets more business from the awareness it gets from Start-up A’s efforts on social networks!
SOURCE:startup.channelnewsasia
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