Why some businesses die young?

When I speak with business owners, most of them agree that things happen the best when “THEY” do it, whether it is creating a product/service or selling it. Most of these highly talented entrepreneurs are stuck at a particular level in their businesses just because they are unable to delegate or transfer their niche to others. There are cases where owners share “just enough” stuffs to their subordinates in fear that they would steal the formula and start on their own. But the real question is, does hiding prevent it from not happening? I don’t think so. It’s the confidence that matters. I see confident business people saying, “let them steal, I am sure they can’t make it to my level,” and some even go to an extent of saying “I am happy if they made it well.”

As you must be well aware that a business is called healthy only if it generates a safe passive income or has a roadmap for the same in upcoming years. Most of the newbie entrepreneurs ignore the importance of building a business that runs on a system and relies on its people. It has been proven by successful corporate giants that a system-run business has a high success rate than the ones that don’t have one. So what needs to be done? Following are a couple of suggestions.

1. Vision alignment. If the owner has diamonds in his head and his team has mangoes in their heads, all are in serious trouble. It is very important for a business owner to define the organizational vision and make sure all of his team members are aligned to that vision, and the tricky part is to make the team work for themselves rather than making them work for the company, the latter one has given extremely great results for me in my coaching assignments.
2. Fearless delegation. Finding out the right people in the team, getting the job done. There might be a couple of errors at the beginning which you might need to handle wisely. It’s like teaching your child how to ride a bicycle, you are going to hold the handles for some days just to make sure your child feels secure, and then one fine day you would say that you are holding the handle but you are actually not. Similarly, delegate people to take care of the tasks and do not invest time in fewer value tasks.
3. Reminding the purpose. During daily activities, employees go through a lot of emotional disturbances, especially sales team undergo a lot of pressure handling negative comments from clients, feedback and other issues which could shoot up their stress levels. So taking a break once in a while in a form of a small dinner or lunch for the whole crew is a healthy way of reminding their purpose in the organization and of course reminding them of the bigger vision. Don’t do these things in your office board room in the traditional way please. Remember, you are dealing with people and not robots, so touching them emotionally and pampering them might give you better results.
4. Build systems. A system should dominate the process, not people. Small and medium-size businesses often consider themselves “too small” to implement systems. I often emphasize on sales systems like building a pipeline, proper forecasting, qualifying leads, tracking opportunity stages, etc. Numerous CRM software available nowadays to make these tasks simple today and you also get excellent business intelligence. If you run a system, you can track and pinpoint an area where things are going wrong and work towards improving it.

You can only be successful if your business runs on a system and will make a profit even if you are absent for some time or longer. Build a team that is not dependent on you 100% to take care of office affairs. Businesses that fail to throw light on the aforementioned areas will probably die young without even knowing that they had options to run it successfully.