July 11, 2007
| Category: Management, Marketing
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When setting up a new business or expanding in other territories, our first logical step as an entrepreneur is to study the strategies and systems of the leading players in the market. We try to identify best practices and incorporate it in our daily operations.
Unfortunately, an effective move set up by your competitor may not work to your advantage. There are many factors to consider like manpower, skill sets, product quality, technology, price, work environment and talking points.
To strengthen your analytical skills, BusinessPundit encourages small business owners to look back to our history books and learn from World War II.
Think about the dead evidence. Don’t look just at winners, look at losers to see if they did the same things as the winners. Don’t just look at what the top companies in your industry are doing, look at what all kinds of different companies are doing. Sometimes you can learn more by looking at failures than at successes.
Yes, it is true! Do not limit your competitive analysis to current business practices of winning companies but also profit from business failures of other startups. Identify things that you must and must not do in your business. If you are already doing something wrong, reboot immediately.
Microsoft Small Business Center explains why failure helps broaden your perspective and attain success over the long haul. The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) created a category of product failures to help educate innovators and entrepreneurs.
July 19th, 2007 at 11:10 am
[...] businesses fail for a lot of reasons. You can blame lack of business skills, stiff competition, poor customer [...]
July 20th, 2007 at 5:32 am
[...] As you enter the world of entrepreneurship there will be many misconceptions you need to come to grips with. Some have glimmer of truth while others are completely baseless. These startup urban legends are destroying the entrepreneurial spirit and driving many people towards business failure. [...]
July 25th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
[...] day yet your small business is still not performing the way you envision it to be? Frustration and fear of failure set in. Suddenly, you find yourself without motivation to work for another [...]
July 26th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
[...] dollars on surveys and focus group discussions to identify the problem and prevent eventual failure. That means you have shell out more money to make this [...]
July 26th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
[...] starting a business, we rarely think about failure or exit strategy. Maybe because of our overflowing self-confidence and passion to succeed, we [...]
July 27th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
[...] and indirect competitors in your chosen category or industry. Typewriter is a classic example of business failure due to poor reaction to market dynamics and indirect competition from [...]
August 29th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
[...] One of the critical success factors for small business is finding a profitable niche or a narrowly defined group of users. Competing in a broad market segment against big and established companies would result in immediate failure. [...]
September 21st, 2007 at 8:17 pm
[...] your skills and learn something unrelated to your small business. It doesn’t have to be useful as long as it will take your mind off your business [...]
July 11th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
[...] are different reasons to terminate employees. The common issue is very poor performance. If you are operating at a loss, however, you have no choice but to fire some of your employees, even if they are meeting your [...]