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6 of the Most Common Reasons Businesses Fail & How to Avoid Them, Auditing Your Social Circle for Success and The Power of Visualisation

One idea to Build your Business, one idea to Scale your life. Every Wednesday.

Welcome to Winformation Weekly. My 13 years’ experience of growing a business from £0-£100m, and the life that goes with it. All wrapped up, in one winning weekly email.

Today in 4 minutes you will learn:

1. BUSINESS: How to navigate 6 of the biggest reasons startups fail

2. LIFE: How to DRAW your social circle?! Auditing your friends in order to succeed

3. MORE: A quote I can’t stop thinking about

No AI, ever. Written for humans, by humans

Business

6 of the Most Common Reasons Businesses Fail

60% of small businesses fail within their first three years. Having started a business from my brother’s garage and growing it to £100m in annual sales, I appreciate the ups and downs of the beginning of that journey. Here are 6 of the most common reasons businesses fail, and how to avoid them.

  1. A lack of shared vision – The vision of your business needs to be crystal clear, as well as answering the big question of why your business exists, what it is going to achieve and how that will be accomplished, but always remember, the team need to have it at the forefront of their mind too. I always joke CEOs should be renamed CRO – Chief Repetition Officer, because you must continually evangelise where you are going as a team.

  2. Not having a plan – A vision is not much use without a plan and vice versa. Yes, you need a vision of where you want to be, but you need to know what your offering is and how you plan to deliver it. Think particularly about where your competitive advantage is. I sit down with our leadership team every six months to review it and ensure the objectives set for this vision are aligned with our long-term goals.

  3. Leadership failure – Everyone in your leadership team needs to set the tone for your business in terms of attitude and the company values. If they don’t, it will have negative consequences for the team, impacting on morale. So always be on the look-out to further improve your leadership skills. Are there things other businesses do you could learn from and adapt and apply to your business, is there further training you could take? Explore and embrace the options.

  4. Business partners not sharing the same outcome – Don’t assume you and your business partner want the same outcome. Agreeing you both want to win isn’t enough. What does winning mean to both of you? Selling the business at a certain point to do something else? Or striving to be even bigger? Make sure you can check in with one another on this. It’s not about both wanting the same thing, but understanding explicitly what one another wants. You can still both win, you just need to know what those wins look like.  

  5. Being a bottleneck for all decisions – Leadership is about making decisions and early on, you need to make a decision that you won’t be involved in every decision! If you want to sign everything off, be prepared to remain dangerously stressed and small. By the same token, that doesn’t mean you abandon the team - track what is being decided upon to see if there is an opportunity to further improve future outcomes.

  6. Financial management – The big one, the obvious one. 1-5 above will all lead to a final deathbed where the symptoms will all be financial. You need a contingency fund. I would aim for 3-5% of all of your profit into a rainy day account to allow for mistakes and issues.

Life

Your Visual Social Circle Audit

One of the biggest factors for the outcome of your life is the people you spend the most time with. Here is a method to visually audit your social circle, and make sure it is optimised for success.

  1. Start by writing down who is in your life – Get a pen and paper and draw your name in a circle, then draw bigger circles around yours, putting the names of those closest to you in each. For example, your partner is likely going to be written in a circle closer to you, than say the person you sit next to at work.

  2. Think about how you spend your time – If you are struggling with how to work out the order of importance of the people in your life, think about who you spend time with at the weekend and at work, as well as things like who left you feeling good or perhaps negative after being in their company.

  3. How do people in your circle make you feel? – Now explore your closest relationships in further detail. Don’t leave out the difficult ones, these need to be addressed because they are doing you harm. Describe the relationship – what do you do together, how do you communicate and who starts that process? Perhaps the biggest question of all – how do you feel about seeing that person after seeing them?

  4. Bring the positive people close – Ultimately, if there are people in your life who aren’t supporting you, you need to ask yourself whether they should be in your closest circle, while perhaps there are people in the list you would benefit from spending more time with.

…Plus More!

A Quote I Can’t Stop Thinking About

“If you can see it in your mind, you can hold it in your hands”

Bill Proctor

I can attest to this. I’ve visualised myself sitting exactly where I am today, and I did this a decade ago.

Until next week! 

Let’s win, together!