Six Mistakes Can Stop You Making a Thriving Business

In the business world, we see some companies are flourishing year on year whereas some others are struggling despite so much potential. Why this happen? Why some companies having so much potential fail to create impact and make business sustainable? Successful companies must be doing something right that creating the difference.

Throughout my career, I never worked in the same industry and similar kinds of jobs. Having the opportunity to work in a completely new industry and role, triggered learning and enriched my knowledge. With more than 10 years of working experience, I have observed a few factors impacts negatively on business performance.

Product Quality:

Warren Buffet said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently”. This is a fact! It takes a lot of hard work and sweat to achieve goodwill in the market but one or two missteps are enough to ruin it. It is absolutely a wrong idea to cover quality problems with colorful marketing and sales efforts. Sooner or later customers will know a lack of quality issues, spread through word of mouth to your loyal and potential customers. Devastating! You will lose trust. Customers will give a second thought about buying your product or taking your service.

Want to be a market leader — focus to make your product so remarkable that customers are eager to buy it. A remarkable product is one of your key marketing tools.

Top-down Management:

Do every member of your team feels that their ideas or suggestions are heard before taking any crucial business decision where their contribution is vital for the result? If not, top-down management is practiced in the company. Top-down management is followed when company top management makes most of the decisions and pass it downwards for execution.

From my experience I have seen, my boss knows it all working culture kills ideas that could bring positive change in the company. Thinking their ideas won’t be welcomed and taken seriously, employees refrain to give ideas and suggestions to the management. Company top management loses the opportunity to implement a brilliant idea and strengthen their competitive advantage over the competition.

In a company I worked, due to top management pressure, employees even forced to do things they think won’t bring results. So the outcome — valuable time and resource wasted to achieve a result, which could have been avoided if management took input from down the level.

Earning enough money is important for employees, but it does not ensure they will be engaged at work. Just think about yourself, what motivates you to work in your current organization? Is it only money? Or it also involves the challenge you feel while working and the sense of accomplishment when you achieve the desired result? Not having a chance to apply creativity to find a solution to a problem kills motivation.

Each individual is unique and has something new to offer. When an organization values each employee input, ideas and recognizes creativity, no doubt it will go ahead.

Decision Making:

One of the companies I worked, was slow in decision making regarding key issues. I have seen how significantly this impacted the business bottom line. To win in today’s competitive market, prompt decision making is vital to thrive. Slow to exploit an opportunity, no doubt another player in the market will take it and diminish your competitive advantage. Employees lose enthusiasm to take initiative if they see no action from management.

Rather than intuition, gut feeling, and experience, use a data-driven approach to make decisions. Decisions based on data/facts also less likely to be erroneous.

Market Knowledge:

Suppose there are two marketing teams in the marketing department, Team A members do not go to the market regularly, have vague knowledge about customer expectations whereas Team B members regularly visit the market and have a clear understanding. These two teams are asked to design marketing campaigns, which team do you think did it better? Yes, you are right. Obviously Team B. I have seen a few campaigns failed to get the desired outcome just because it did not meet consumer needs. The reason is, not having appropriate market knowledge and dependency on the sales team along with advertising agency while designing the campaign.

Market knowledge is crucial to meet existing and potential customer need. Going to the market, and assessing customers need and want is decisive to maintain a strong foothold.

Unrealistic Growth Target:

10 to 15% year on year revenue growth was expected from us to achieve, even in a growing market, this target is quite challenging. Just think, how the situation could be if it is expected to achieve without proper research on market situation. The marketing and sales team faced tremendous pressure and gave a deep dive to achieve the given target. But failed to meet monthly and quarterly targets despite working late at night six days a week. Team members became demotivated and productivity slumps which lead to further disappointments.

Focus on realistic and challenging but attainable targets for the team; it will increase motivation and spark productivity leading target achievement.

Bureaucratic Process:

Processes are designed to make operation simple and transparent. Since the market and organizational business situation changes from time to time, processes should be updated to meet the changing need. If the process hampers productivity and makes peoples life hard, innovation or taking initiative decreases, which is not desirable.

Identify which processes are not user friendly and have a scope of improvement, update it to ensure smooth business operation.

Relationship with Business Partners:

Any business relationship with stakeholders is very important, especially if it is a distribution business. One of the companies I worked, used to sell products through dealers, made relationships with some of them so bitter than when a customer visits them to buy, they recommended competition product despite being the company’s authorized dealer. This happened because of dealers were pushed to take product although they have unsold products in their shop. And there were strict merchandising guidelines from the company that they had to comply.

Dealer’s relationship with the distributor became very professional without any emotional connection. Lack of emotional connection and strict rules made dealers unhappy. They started to promote and sell competition products whenever they get a chance.

Maintain a close connection with business partners vital for any business to survive and thrive. Look for ways to create bond with them, so that when the market becomes tough you get their wholehearted support.

Abdul Mukaddes is a Customer Service and Marketing Expert and Trainer, having more than 10 years of working experience in corporate, tech and startup companies. I would like to hear from you about how you think about this article. Let’s discuss! You can also reach me in abdulmukaddes@gmail.com