If You Want To Destroy Your Business, Do This

The acitivities of most entrepreneurs slowly kill their businesses unknowingly, until there’s nothing left to salvage. This happens because of a wide range of factors that are largely caused by the inexperience of the parties involved, and when the rot has eaten too deep into the organisation, it becomes too late to fix, and the company most likely goes under.

How can you avoid being in this situation and what factors can cause you to destroy your business?

While there could be a far wider range of options, if you want to destroy your business, do these 8 things:

See Also: How To Survive And Dominate The First 6 Months Of Your New Business

1). Not Having Strong Agreements:

Poor contracts with shareholders, directors, employees, partners, and much more could cause major problems in your business when one of the parties deliberately risks the position of the organisation and nothing serious can be done about it.

See Also: The Importance Of A Shareholders Agreement To Every Small Business

2). Not Having Trademarks Or Patents:

You should always thrive to protect the intellectual property of your business no matter what it is. If you’re a technology company with a proprietary new product, you should strive to have a patent registered, else, you could have competition nose-diving and replicating exactly what you’ve done. You should also protect your trademark so that no one can just use your company’s name for any personal business gains.

If you fail to protect your intellectual property, thousands or millions could go down the drain when everyone exploits your hardwork to build businesses of their own.

3). Not Keeping Proper Accounting And Customer Records:

Records are there for a reason. They help you know the financial health of your business and the in-flow and out-flow rates of your customers.

When you don’t keep records, you move blindly and can’t really tell if you’re cashflow positive or not. As you burn through your capital base, can’t determine which customers are reacting to what, you’d run your business blindly till it hits a wall.

See Also: 7 Sure Ways To Cut Your Small Business Expenses And Increase Your Profit

4). Hiring More Of Friends & Family Members:

Family and friends do more harm than good when they work for their co-family and friends. The primary reason for this is they’d tend to respect you less, be highly prone to flaunting the organisation’s rules, and it would be more difficult for you to hold them accountable or impose disciplinary actions. Even worse, the rest of your organisation will feel you’re treating them partially, and so, would come to have lesser faith in your integrity as a person.

To be safe on running a business that could thrive, never employ family and friends, so you can be unbiasd in your decision making processes and also take serious actions if the situation warrants it.

See Also: 3 Hires That Can Make Your Small Business Revenues Explode

5). Using Your Business Revenue For Personal Purposes:

The second you start using your company’s money to go on vacations, buy cars, houses, shopping, and much more, your business would come crashing faster than you would expect.

Always seperate business finances from personal finances, and stick to spending only what your company pays you, without dipping into its coffers.

6). Not Treating Your Employees Right:

When employees are treated right, they reciprocate the attention to your customers. If you treat them poorly, they’ll treat your customers poorly, and when your customers leave, your business will perform poorly before it eventually crashes.

To build a successful business, you must treat your employees as good as you would treat yourself.

7). Thinking You’re More Important Than The Customer:

The customer is the most important person in every business and should be treated only as such. Without them your business won’t generate any sales, and in a short time could die off before ever having the chance to grow.

If you treat your customers right, they’ll buy more from you and would introduce more customers to you. If you do the opposite, you’d eventually end up without a business.

See Also: This Is Why Your Customers Are Not Paying You

8). Strictly Building The Company Around You:

You should build your organisation to be able to run independently from you. When you centralise the company’s operations around you, taking a simple vacation or falling sick would halt your operations and prevent growth. But when you have a strong management team that takes key actions to grow the firm, your presence or absence would guarantee growth.

What are your thoughts on these 8 things that will destroy your business? Let me know by leaving a comment below.