Apr
08
Home Business Mistakes: What would you do differently?
If you’re from Digg, How We Killed Social Media is here.
Problogger has a question post up asking his readers to tell their biggest blogging mistakes. The answers — 187 at the time of this writing — are surprising. Amazing how the same answers keep coming up over and over.
Got me thinking, what about home business mistakes? It’s easy to think of the mistakes bigger businesses make — insufficient funding, too much funding, not hiring the right people — but those aren’t really applicable for your home business.
My Small Business Mistake
Mine was definitely not scaling for growth. I just didn’t realize that the marketing for small business services I was offering would take off as well as they did. I was totally unprepared. I was working 18 hour days and still falling behind. Don’t know how I would have pre-empted that without halting my growth, but it’s something to think about.
What about you? What mistakes did you make? What would you do differently if you could start again? What advice would you offer?
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Good Question, Naomi!
Let’s see… I think my biggest mistake is that I waited so long to really get things going. I officially started my web design company in 2001, but haven’t “really” started working hard at it until last year.
I often wonder where I’d be right now if I had pushed myself this hard 7 years ago…
All in all, I’d say don’t wait! If you have an idea and want to start a business – just get to it! Give it your all right from the start, because time flies much quicker than you’d think.
Oooh, good question. Then again, I’m brilliant so I don’t make business mistakes…
Seriously. Yes, I do.
1 – Enjoying control a little too much: I have trouble delegating trust.
2 – I prepared for growth – I did not prepare for sudden celebrity stardom.
3 – Being too friendly with people who work for me: I get burned easily from trusting too much.
(Yes, 3 and 1 conflict. I trust people too much but can’t trust they’ll do a great job. It’s a quandry.)
4 – Not billing enough for my time. Or not billing for my time at all.
5 – My favorite words are, “We can do that.” Unfortunately, I have yet to learn the words, “We’re booked until Christmas. Please take a number.”
6 – The inability to resist attraction to bright, shiny things that ultimately suck away my time and leave me scrambling to catch my ass.
7 – Having my business open nearly 24/7.
Erm let me think… What did I do wrong with the Zoohliah ?
1 – Not working on my project full time, but then I don’t really have a choice, a girl’s gotta eat…
2 – Being afraid of success. Yes, it seems crazy, but I realize that it’s true.
3 – Being afraid of things getting out of hand
4 – So that ends up in being reluctant too take the next step (getting bigger, asking for a loan…).
5 – Having to do everything by myself, but then again, no real choice here.
6 – Not billing my time : I can’t yet, that’s why I need to work on the side.
My biggest mistake was hiring people. I’m a lousy manager and need to be entirely on my own. Learning that cost me a LOT of money – easily into six figures.
Look everyone! My husband’s post has more comments than mine.
@ Selene — I think that happens all the time! We worry and wait and worry and wait and then when we finally get around to it, we wonder what we were waiting for. Great advice!
@ James — We had the 24/7 issue too, and the “We can do that”? Yeah, that’s a little bit of a problem around here too.
@ Tony — Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I could never hire anybody other than maybe an intern. I have a hard enough time delegating a database to my husband — a database, I should mention, that I couldn’t do with a gun to my head.
Not telling everyone I could get my filthy little hands on about my new business venture. This is actually a problem I just identified last night, but I’m going to go do something about it right now.
Here’s the thing, when you’ve just started off, and you have no website or business cards or pretty stationary or local phone number (that last is sadly true; my cell still runs on a CA area code), you feel like calling everyone you know up and begging them for work.
Except you don’t. Because you have pride. And pride will KILL you.
Call EVERYONE. Call your grandmother. Call people from college you barely knew. Send out a massive email. Contact your alumni list and your parent’s contacts and your parent’s friends contacts and tell them all to refer you to other people. Forget throwing a rock in the pond for the ripples. Throw a driveway’s worth of gravel in there.
This is my new plan. Here goes.
Interesting to note that Naomi doesn’t claim her biz-mistake was “…not scaling for success” — she said: “…not scaling for growth.”
As lone-gunmen, hourly-or-project billing machines (ha!), and chief-cook-and-bottle-washers, we often confuse the two: success and growth. Because we probably didn’t set up a metric for measuring either ‘maintainable success’ or ’sustainable growth’ before we started.
(An aside to Selene and Tei: you only have one chance to ruin a first impression; waiting is stalling, but preparing-that-takes-time is doing.)
So if Naomi’s earliest definition of success, other than ‘put food on table’, were to ‘get rich quick’ — as soon as her growth exploded she could have achieved that by uber-upping her fees to reduce the work load/client list to ‘managable’ and get more ROI — but in achieving that “rich” goal, she’d have failed her core clientèle: ittyBizs that can’t afford a 10xhigher fee. That would’ve been the opposite of success.
Instead, she smartly (instinctively?) choose GROWTH (in her desired direction) as the measure of success she wanted, and after some tough weeks or re-organization, etc., she got a handle on the surprise growth explosion by delivering what she had promised promised — real world/like minded small business marketing experience — her stories about how tough it was became exactly the lessons we needed to push through our own trials.
This has earned her business/blog a smarter and louder and more loyal client/reader base than any high-paying multi-week-project satisfied-client’s testimonial every could have: KILLER WORD OF MOUTH. (Or, word of keyboard, I guess.)
I couldn’t just say ‘good post’ huh? Please excuse the extra education I get by parsing out the terrific lessons Naomi wraps in caustic wit and layered examples.
And all of those mistakes James/MWP had listed, I have lived through as well; it’s nice to see them somehow neutered of emotion in his list, instead of the bullying regrets they’d seemed in my own list. Until now.
Thanks for raising the subject, Naomi.
@ GirlPie… Neutered is a word that… mm… doesn’t do well in male presence.
The lack of emotion is because I have no regrets and I see no failure in my mistakes. I only see learning experiences that have helped me and my business grow. There’s nothing to be emotional about, unless it’s to be thankful I lived those situations.
James — it was NICE to see all the mistakes you listed,
which had been bullies to me before I read your smart list,
reduced to being incapable of raising emotion in me.
Neutered is exactly what your list did to those bullies — what a lovely gift you offered.
Your lack-of-emotion and reasons were clear; I apologize that my compliment to your comment must not have been.
And what an interesting group IttyBiz attracts — !
My first mistake is my high expectation of making money from online business, and then only small amount was made. it was because that i thought only one topic and i did not define the specific market.