Anyone who has ever started a business has made a mistake or two or three. While most people accept that slip-ups are unavoidable, entrepreneurs often don’t like to own up to making mistakes. There are certain behaviors or misguided decisions that get in the way of small business owners taking their business to the next level. The key is to learn from and overcome your mishaps.
BlackEnterprise.com checked in with of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses. The question put forth to their members: what are some of the biggest mistakes you made in business and how did you overcome them? Here’s what they had to say.
1. Not Asking the Right Questions
The more scared you are to ask a question the more important it is for you to ask it. Early in my career I was afraid to ask the tough questions, and it was costing me; literally. I finally took a just go for it attitude and, like many things, asking hard questions wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. Having polite, frank and direct conversations is essential to any successful business.
— Derek Hunter, William Roam
2. Talent Mismatch
Early on, I mistakenly attempted to get my CFOs to do business development. When this experiment fell flat, I realized that instead of trying to make square pegs fit round holes, I should have enabled people to play to their core strengths. I hired a senior sales director and a business development team to focus on growing sales which I should have done in the first place.
— David Ehrenberg , Early Growth Financial Services
3. Not Delegating Fast Enough
As a founder, I want to show my employees that I’m not above doing anything, even if the office toilet backs up. But employees are eager to learn and grow and the only way for them to do that is to own the job aspects I once did. For us, the best way to retain talent is to delegate more and give everyone career growth and job fulfillment.
— Michael Portman , Birds Barbershop
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4. Becoming Complacent
As Andy Grove said, “Only the paranoid survive.” During fast growth phases, I’ve made the mistake of not spending enough time thinking about what’s around the corner. It’s easy to ride the wave of success, but if you’re not paranoid about the next competitor, market change, regulation or shift in customer needs/attitudes, you will miss the opportunity or worse.
— Jeremy Brandt , WeBuyHouses.com
5. Taking Things Personally
I took things too personally early on. I would get bent out of shape if we didn’t sign a client or if a potential partnership or collaboration didn’t pan out. I quickly learned that “it’s just business” and began to just brush it off and move onto the next goal. Dwelling on things that are out of your control wastes valuable energy that can be used for more productive purposes.
— Jonathan Long , Market Domination Media
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6. Building a Product Without Customer Feedback
We built an entire product without any customer feedback. As you can expect, it was a failure. We scratched it all and started with an MVP (minim viable product) launch. We leveraged our customers’ insights to build a truly superior product that’s dominating the market now.
— Syed Balkhi , OptinMonster
7. Not Paying for Quality
We’ve decided to go with cheaper freelancers in the past, and it really hurt us in the end. The quality of work was not up to par with what we needed and we ended up paying twice just to get the project done right. Now, we recognize that paying more for quality is always worth the cost.
— Brooke Bergman , Allied Business Network Inc.
8. Not Having a LaserTargeted Focus
Our most profitable years have been without question those spent focusing on
building up just one aspect of the business at any given time. When you’re spinning several plates at once, you get mediocre results across the board. However, once you laser focus on one specific area (before moving onto the next), it opens up your creativity, frees your mind from distractions and the results are second to none.— Alex Miller, PosiRank LLC
9. Getting Caught Up With Side Projects
Entrepreneurs tend to have a million different business ideas constantly floating in their heads. However, it is important that once you’ve picked one to run with, you stick with it even if you get excited about something else. Early on, we got caught up in various projects that had nothing to do with our core business, and it almost caused us to fail. We found success once we found focus.
— James Simpson , GoldFire Studios
10. Not Focusing on Building the Team
One of my biggest mistakes was not focusing on building my team fast enough. It’s always tough to balance building your product with building your team. Looking back, I would have spent more time putting our development team in place quicker instead of working on the product myself. Making an initial upfront investment to ensure your team is in place to scale the product is super important.
— Arian Radmand , CoachUp
11. Chasing the VC’s Dream
Feedback is
indispensable, but too much of anything isn’t healthy. When raising our Series A, we acted on feedback from numerous venture capitalists and, before we knew, we had pivoted too far from our core business in an effort to become “investible.” This proved disastrous. After a hard knock, we retraced our steps and eventually raised capital from likeminded investors to build a sustainable business.— Vishal Shah , NoPaperForms
12. Focusing on the Wrong Thing
The biggest mistake we made was spending our first year obsessing over a product that no one actually wanted. Instead, we should have made the minimum viable product; a barebones version to test the market. It would have saved us time, capital and stress. Mistakes can’t always be avoided, but you can try and mitigate their impact by making smaller and quicker ones.
— Ross Cohen , BeenVerified
13. Being Too Ahead of the Market
My first startup in 2004 failed. The biggest mistake I made was trying to push ideas that were ahead of their time. We were working on a mobile social network that used location based technology. The world wasn’t ready for it. I overcame this by going into sales to prove I could sell. I also got back into coding, and the relationships I developed over the next few years led to Movable Ink.
— Vivek Sharma , Movable Ink