Your ability to make the right decisions is the reason your business has not collapsed. You might have taken some wrong decisions that almost ruined your business but despite all, you still came back on your feet.
You may not always be lucky, so you should avoid taking wrong decisions in your business. Below are 15 decisions that you should not make because they will ruin your business.
1. Minimising Marketing
When you minimize marketing, your chances of getting new customers are low. If you don’t have enough customers to patronize your business, you can’t make enough profit that you need to run your business.
Marketing is very important in gaining new customers so you can’t afford to put in all your efforts. Do not minimize your marketing because it can ruin your business.
2. Killing Employees’ Confidence
Your business can either thrive or slack based on your employees’ job satisfaction. When you kill the confidence of your employees, it can lead to low productivity and poor customer service.
Remember that employees are very important to keep your business going forward.
Try your best to build a work environment that motivates and builds the confidence of your employees. You will only ruin your business if your employees are working without confidence.
3. Targeting the Wrong Audience
You can spend lots of money on marketing and it won’t yield any results. This happens when you target the wrong audience. The wrong audience cannot be converted to customers who will buy over and over again.
You need to ask the ‘who’ question. “Who are the people that will benefit from this product or service?”
If you don’t ask this question, you will end up focusing on people who don’t value or need your product or service which will lead to the ruin of your business.
4. Employing Lots of Family Members and Friends
People tend to misbehave when they work for friends and family members. When you employ more family members, they tend to be disrespectful, they are prone to disobey the company’s rules and regulations.
When they misbehave, it is difficult for you to take disciplinary action against them. To make things worse, other staff will feel you are not treating everyone equally and this will reduce their trust in you as a person.
In order not to ruin your business, don’t over-employ family members and friends so that you won’t be partial when making decisions and be able to take serious actions when need be.
5. Over-promising Customers
When you want to market your business, especially when the deal looks lucrative, you can be tempted to paint your product or service as perfect, flawless, and the best in the industry.
However, if you promise above what you can give, it may ruin your reputation and in return, ruin your business.
It is advisable to under-promise and then over-deliver. You may not gain every deal but you will be able to keep the customers that patronize you.
6. Spending Business Funds on Personal Purposes
Your business is on its way to doom the moment you start to use business funds for personal purposes.
Don’t use your business funds to buy a house, car, designer wears, and other personal needs unless you decide to ruin your business.
Let there be a clear difference between your funds and your business funds. Spend only what your business pays you and don’t dip your hands into your business money.
7. Poor Interpersonal Relationship
Business is more than just producing quality products and offering excellent services. Your interaction with your customers will determine if they will come back or not.
No matter how good your product or service may be, if you have a poor interpersonal relationship, your customers will not return and this will lead to the ruin of your business.
8. Running Your Business Unethically
If you run your business unethically, then you are planning to ruin your business. Don’t try to steal, sell expired products, or do other illegal things because you want to make extra income.
If you do this, you will tarnish your business’ image and your reputation.
No amount of money is worth harming others, going to prison, and losing your reputation.
9. Growing Too Fast
When you expand before you gain the required skill, funds, and administrative support needed to handle your business, it engulfs you and causes your business to lose money.
The aftermath is that you will be unable to handle or manage the losses which will lead to the ruin of your business.
If you are a start-up, growth is inarguably positive. The bigger the operation, the bigger the audience, sales, income, and profits!
However, when you grow too fast, you are prone to some problems that are beyond your capacity.
For instance, if you are too eager to employ more staff, you may employ incompetent ones. Your customers’ support team may not be prepared to meet the need of many customers. Your server may be too small to cater to increased traffic and so on.
As much as growth is good and every business should aim to grow, it is advisable to let your business grow gradually and steadily. By this, you would have gained the skills and other resources needed to cater to the growth.
10. Being Lazy
Laziness is a very bad attitude that someone should not have. It affects your drive and ability to meet deadlines. This will result in low productivity and you won’t be able to satisfy your customers.
If you are a lazy person, your business will suffer and this will lead to the ruin of your business.
11. Disregarding Customers’ Feedback
When you don’t give room for customers’ feedback in your business, you miss an important opportunity to know what the customers want and how to serve them better. You may lose your customers because you didn’t give room for feedback. By the time, you realize it, it may have been too late.
Do not take customers’ feedback for granted unless you want to ruin your business.
12. Neglecting Your Health
When you neglect your health, you will not have the energy and stamina required to run your business effectively. If you don’t pay attention to your health, your business will slack which in turn can ruin your business.
13. Focusing on Quantity over Quality
While you want to earn massively from your business, the quality of your product or service should not be on the line.
If your business is known for selling quality products or serv services customers will move to another organization that offers them the quality they desire. You will only ruin your business if you focus on quantity over quality.
14. Bad Management of Resources
You have to manage your resources well so that you will not run into debt. You need to run your business according to budget. Spending without a budget can reduce your cash flow.
When you run out of cash, there will be no funds to pay staff or meet other financial needs which will lead to the ruin of your business.
15. Poor Customer and Accounting Records
Records are crucial to the smooth running of an organization. They help you to know how well your business is doing and how customers flow in and out of your organization.
If you don’t keep records, you will move haphazardly because you can’t tell if your cash flow is positive or negative.
If you can’t tell how customers flow in and out of your company and don’t have a proper accounting record of funds, you are going to ruin your business.
Now that you have known some 15 decisions that will ruin your business, it is good that you avoid these decisions or make corrections if you already made these decisions.
Apply what you have learned in this post to your business so that your business won’t fold up.
Share this post with your loved ones so that they don’t make the wrong decisions. Also, drop your comments about what you have learned in the comment section.
Writer: Happiness Ajayi
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