Steer Clear of These Beginner Business Mistakes

When it comes to establishing a business strategy, it can be easy to fall victim to easy beginner business mistakes. Whether it’s your first business or your tenth, everyone is vulnerable to common error. So what can you do to make sure you’re building a successful business model? Here are a few beginner mistakes to watch out for when starting a business.

1. Not Defining Your Focus

It’s easy to become just another name in the mix of so many within your industry. As a business owner, the last thing you want is to fall victim to becoming just another option in the crowd. By defining your focus to create a unique “it” factor within your organization, you can differentiate yourself to stand out and increase your business’s recognition.

Places like Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, and Domino’s all compete in the same market but, because of their defined focus, they each pull from different directions. Price, quality, and speed are some of the specific focus areas that each of these chains has gone after now.

2. Assumptions of Quick Success

Assuming that your business will take off quickly can lead to a lot of unnecessary spending before your organization is established. In the beginning, making a large push on PR is the best step to help create an established brand – only then does spending more money on advertising begin to make sense from an efficiency standpoint.

Go into your business with realistic expectations by making sure you thoroughly research your market, your competitors, and expected costs and revenue. This is why creating a business plan is such an invaluable and effective step in starting a business. (To learn more, check out our blog “6 Must-Haves for a Successful & Effective Business Plan.”)

3. Looking Past the Importance of Names

Another mistake that a lot of business owners make when starting out is trying to come up with a name for the product before fully developing its focus. You want to be able to create a name that accurately describes your product’s functionality and grabs your audience’s attention.

A great example of this is how Monster stepped up as the second energy drink choice to Red Bull when they first came onto the market. A major aspect of Monster’s success was how well the name matched up to the drink’s purpose of creating an energetic “monster-like” feeling. Other companies attempted to create energy drinks around this time but were unsuccessful at aligning a name that made customers want to purchase their product.