Who else knows 7 ways to fail at home based business?
Are there only 7 ways to fail at home based business? Have any good tips on how you drove a perfectly good business opportunity into the ground? When it comes to small businesses, home based business or work from home opportunities, no one seems to point out how many ingenious ways there are to fail miserably. Some are obvious, but some of them hide right in plain sight or should I say hide on plain site. Take a look at this case study and the seven ways this business utilized to go down in flames.
There is a concrete company that will remain nameless, but for this case we’ll call it Ready Mix 2 U. Ready Mix 2 U started at the height of the concrete demand in a super hot market. Big Ready Mix companies had more orders than they could handle from large contractors and so the little guy and do it yourself home owners were left with at least a month lead time for deliveries. Enter Ready Mix 2 U – champion of the shortload, those small deliveries the big companies don’t really want anyway. A perfect niche market play, right? Hot market, high demand, what more could you ask for?
Here are seven ways to fail in this scenario:
1. Don’t Market
This is not to be confused with another tried and true method for failure, which is to not develop a sound marketing plan at all. In this case assume that the marketing plan exists, but it is not executed. This one seems like a no brainer, but there are people who put some thought into how a business should be marketed, even pay someone to develop a plan, then don’t execute it. Any small or home based business can almost certainly guarantee failure by ignoring known solutions and instead simply waiting for the phone to ring because the market is so hot for their product.
2. Lack Passion
If all else fails don’t be excited about what the business is, in other words lack passion. When asked a direct question respond with a vague answer. Don’t tell anyone what the business is when the opportunity arises. Try mumbling so that people immediately lose interest regardless of what led them to seek out information.
3. Be Cheap
When launching a business put almost no capital into it. Don’t do anything that might present the appearance of professionalism. This failure mechanism is quite easy to invoke – free websites, free business cards, use a home phone line, let an out of work relative handle the phones or lead operations. The possibilities are endless. In fact this can be tied to not marketing at all.
4. Don’t Follow-up
Of all the items on this list this is truly the coup de gras. No matter what the endeavor, a surefire, no holds barred, hit the accelerator going into the turn, way to rip failure out of the hands of success is to not follow up. To illustrate this just try it. Do everything else right, get a great product, do great marketing, hire great people, then don’t follow up and see what happens. In this scenario, the only way a sale is made is the first time direct conversion. Good luck.
5. Don’t Be Consistent
By all means be random, if anything close to science bares its ugly face chase it away. There are no tests required, no processes in place, no systems deployed. Market a little today, follow-up sometimes, establish no roles or responsibilities. If something works take that as a queue that something else will work too. Always be different, failure can find that moving target even when nothing else can.
6. Recreate the wheel
Believe it or not all wheels don’t have to be round. There are those other wheels that no one uses because of some sensible reason that’s confines common logic. So by all means, recreate the wheel. The beauty of this path to failure is that it has so many applications. Recreating the wheel can be applied as easily to marketing as it can to operations. In fact any place that there is structure can be a valid point of entry. To ensure demise points of emphasis should be placed on whatever’s working.
7. Focus on meaningless tasks
How many times is the word VALUE going to be thrown around? Forget value and valued added those terms are cliché. In order to assure that a business fail lead a effort to allocate as many resources as possible to do perfectly meaningless tasks. The best way to do this is to introduce an activity based pay system, pay people for not only looking busy and acting busy, but doing the maximum amount of busy work possible. It may not seem like much, but when more focus is on optimizing the ORDER HERE button than order processing, it will have a distinct impact on the bottom line.
Not all home based business opportunities are MLMs and not all are created equal. But almost all of these 7 ways to fail at a home based business will apply.