While many people fail in business, many more succeed. If you subtract the foolish failures - restaurants being the most foolish, followed by any sort of glamour business (think travel, bed & breakfast, sports, celebrity) or retail business - the number of successes far outweigh the failures.
When starting a business, you can drastically reduce your risk of failure by becoming an expert in two areas:
- First you must understand everything you can about the products and/or services you will be selling.
- Second, you must become competent (and eventually masterful) at the specific marketing skills you need to sell them.
How do you become an expert in two things simultaneously?
The best way I know is to get a job working for the type of business you want to start.
Think of your employment as a paid training program. Work fifty or sixty hours a week (even if they don't pay you a nickel extra) absorbing everything you can. Pay particular attention to people and situations that help you understand how the business works.
By learning "on the job," you'll develop skills and accumulate ideas that will make starting your own business a hundred times easier. Some of these skills will be of a more general kind, like writing effective memos, pitching ideas at meetings, handling troublesome people, etc. Some of them will be more targeted: such as how to write persuasive copy or how to select lists of names to send promotions to.
The same will be true of the ideas you get. Some will be small - a clever way to run a meeting, a useful technique for following up on delegations, etc. And some will be big, powerful and very exciting.
The more you learn, the easier it will be to add to your knowledge and the more eager you'll become to start your own business. Try to resist that temptation until you've invested at least 600 hours in learning the product/service side of the industry and another 600 learning the marketing.
Remember, any complex skill takes about 1000 hours to learn and even if you have good teaching, you still need at least 600 hours before you know enough to avoid the obvious mistakes.
When it comes to launching your business, don't reinvent the wheel. Come up with a product and a marketing position that is 80% to 90% the same as what your most successful competitors are doing.
Remember, there is a good reason that they are successful. By investing 600+ hours into learning the product/service part of the business and another 600+ hours on the marketing, you should already have a good idea about why things work. But you aren't yet an expert. It takes much more time (about 5000 hours) to do that.
And that's why you have to proceed with caution - one small step at a time. Yes, you should try new things, but as I said they should be only 10% to 20% new. Taking this sort of conservative approach will not limit your growth because you will be able to "catch up" later. If you aren't careful and try something entirely new and different, chances are it will fail - however good you think the idea is. Remember: the key idea is this: until you've had 5000 hours of experience, you are not an expert. Don't act like one.
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