The Seven Deadly Sins of Small Business

by Dr Greg Chapman

While running a successful business is not easy, there are rules that you can follow that will almost certainly increase your success. And there are also sins that will guarantee your failure.

Here are the Seven Deadly Sins of Business.

1. Ambiguity

If you are not explicit in what you want to achieve for your business, you are highly unlikely to be successful. Setting out clear goals for your business allows you to develop strategies to achieve your goals and to create plans which will ultimately drive your business to success. Without goals, strategies and plans, you are just depending on luck- and how has that worked for you so far?

How to Avoid Your Business becoming a Microstayer?

by Dr Greg Chapman

The biggest risk for most businesses is not whether they will fail. Most won’t. The biggest risk is that they will stay small. Whether by design or not. Recent ABS data show that 98% of micro-businesses stay that way. That is, they are Micro-Stayers.

There are a number of reasons that businesses become Micro-Stayers. It could be a lifestyle choice. Work-Life balance is becoming more and more important to many people. It may be because they don’t have the knowledge to take their business to the next level, and become frustrated Micro-Stayers. Or they may have progressed from frustrated to resigned Micro-Stayers and have adjusted lifestyle and ambition in recognition of this.

Businesses that involuntarily stay small, the Micro-Stayers, do so for five key reasons.

Small Business False Economies

by Dr Greg Chapman

I was recently discussing with a business owner the future of his business which has an innovative product but low sales. He had invested over a million dollars in the business developing this product, but had spent nothing on marketing. The owner told me how he believed that their product was superior to others on the market, but because of their size, other businesses were not taking them seriously.

Predict Your Business' Future

by Dr Greg Chapman

It’s easy to predict the future. We do it all the time. When you go for a bank loan, they look at your credit history. If you go for a job, they look at your work history.

We predict the future by looking at the past and based on the assumption, a leopard doesn’t change its spots, we will generally be right.

We are creatures of habit. We travel to work the same way each day and do our weekly shopping at the same supermarket. Why? It’s because we have finished experimenting, and we are comfortable with the outcomes we currently get.

However, results do vary. Sometimes there is a traffic jam on our favourite route, or the supermarket is out of our favourite dessert, but we still stick with the tried and true. More...

Ad of the Month - Reinvention

by Dr Greg Chapman

Imagine you had a product which had been largely been overtaken by technology in a particular market, and you wanted to get back into that market?

Canon used to be a major player in the consumer photography market, and then along came phones with quality cameras making your digital cameras unnecessary. What do you do?

You do something with your cameras that phones can’t do.