Five Mistakes I Made Starting A Business

Mistakes I Made Starting a Business

I started a business in my last semester of college and although we have been pretty successful there really has only been one constant since the very beginning: Mistakes.

Mistakes are learning experiences that help build us into more effective leaders. We all have to learn from our own mistakes, but hopefully through this post you can learn sometime from my mistakes I have made starting my business.

Here are five mistakes I made starting a business:

  • Hiring Too Fast – In the beginning I ran my business extremely lean not even taking a paycheck for quite a while. Once I got my first big client or two, rather than paying myself I decided it was time to hire someone else. Many people make this same mistake. They hire too fast without a plan for what the new hire will actually do. When hiring early in a new business it should be because you just simply cannot add more to you plate. The first hire is not about growth. It is about maintenance. The next hires should be about growth.
  • Not Firing Fast Enough – In a new small business, you can afford to get a hire wrong. But you cannot afford to carry a bad hire too long. I have a belief in people and a belief in myself that I can bring the bets out in people. I ignored issues with people for too long thinking I could “coach” them up. This led to the loss of money and my own time. I found myself spending more time on coaching some of my hires than in business development or working with clients.
  • Not Realizing the Difficulty of Working with Family and Friends – I didn’t just start a business, I started a family business. My dad has worked with me since the beginning. My mom is a partner in the business and I have hired other family members and friends. Because I have always worked so well with my dad and our relationship has stayed really strong, I thought this would be the case for other family or friends I hired. This was not the case. Working with people you know is hard. Not everyone can do it. My biggest problem working with people close to me is that I perhaps have pushed them too much because I believe so much in them. I have pushed them towards my goals and maybe didn’t take their goals into account enough. My advice would be to be careful when working with people close to you. It is not easy.
  • Allowing People to Take Advantage of Me – Not everyone is ethical. In a lot of my business dealings I have done a poor job of having clearly defined contracts, especially with people I have brought on to work with me. I have always been of the belief that a person’s word means the most. I have gotten burned because of this. Business is not emotional. At least it shouldn’t be emotional. Business is logic. It is 100 percent logical to have a contract for every agreement, even the small ones. It should be a very clear contract. Not having these has cost my business at times as there have been people who have taken advantage of my belief in their word and their ethics.
  • Too Often Trying to Do It All Myself – I started my business and right away I partnered with my dad because I knew I needed help. I wish I would have continued that thinking, but I many times I have found myself trying to do it all in my business. Sometimes this is due to hiring mistakes. These have made me a bit gun shy when it comes to asking for help. But you don’t have to hire and employee or a contractor to ask for help. When my business has been at its best it has been a full collaboration. When I think of all the above mistakes, many of them were due to my inability to ask for help. I have had a great resource from the beginning (my dad), but I have not always utilized that resource and that has led to many mistakes.

I make no excuses for the mistakes I have made. Please do not take this post as a list of excuses or blame. I place no blame on anyone else for my mistakes. I take full responsibility. I am the Boss of my life and my business.

My business is not successful in spite of the mistakes I have made. It is successful because of the mistakes I have made. I have learned a lot from all of my mistakes and they have made me into a better leader and business person.

What mistakes have you made in your business?

What have you learned from the mistakes?

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Categories: Leadership, Learning, Personal Responsibility
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