As a Co-founder and COO at StealthEnomics, I couldn’t imagine launching a small business today without the aid of a business coach or advisor. Even now, when a client tells me “I can’t afford a coach!” My advice is to shut down the business. In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace an executive or entrepreneur who doesn’t leverage the insights of a coach or business advisor can count on these predictable results: Significant loss or failure.
Systemic Entrepreneurial Failure
Bloomberg reports that 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months and the SBA notes there about 595,000 businesses closing each year. Question: if you were in the care of a surgeon who said that 8 out of 10 of my patients die in 18 months… would you trust him with your life? Then why are so many of the so-called experts, institutions, and other entities within our startup ecosystem so complacent or anchored in the status quo while our startups tread down paths to a fatal business ending?
3 Reasons For Systemic Entrepreneurial Failure
- Institutions (academic, religious, financial, and military) slowly change (if it all) and are averse to promoting risk. Entrepreneurs embrace risk. Our purposes are incongruent.
- It’s easy to market and pimp ignorance without penalty for perpetrators.
- There’s an absence of dialogue centered around holistically building custom business systems for startup scalability.
When the Wall Street Journal reported 3 out 4 venture-backed companies fail I recoiled in horror, “got woke” and shared my insights with a colleague, Joey Price, CEO at Jumpstart HR, (who is also a member of the Forbes Coaches Council) as a guest on his Business, Life, & Coffee podcast where we discussed the reality that within today’s small business ecosystem “Cash Can’t Save Your Startup.” Here are 3 things to re-evaluate.
3 Transformational Power Moves
- Re-Check Your So-Called Experts and Sources. Don’t let their pedigree, graduate degrees, business title, or the number of social medial followers fool you. Here’s why: IBM’s Information and Governance Unit has stated: “90% of all of the data in the world today was generated in the last 2 years.” What that means is this: What someone accomplished, when they accomplished it, and HOW they did it… may be unrepeatable and obsolete today. Experts have a track record, but they also focus on new trends… not what used to be.
- Unlearn, Learn, Relearn, Repeat. What got you here, won’t be enough to keep you here. Your competition wants you to operate on yesterday’s presumptions while the velocity of change is only increasing and they leverage new data, insights, tools, and expertise to make bold moves. You may not need to change the destination of your business, but may need help recalculating the route to get there.
- Get A Coach. Fast. You’ll never find a champion or winning team that doesn’t leverage the talent and skills of a top-flight coach or advisor and their methodology. Serious entrepreneurs begin with a core winning team: Their lawyer, accountant, and business coach. If an entrepreneur treats their business like a pickup basketball game with no coach, no winning methodology, and no team, it’s not a business… it’s an expensive hobby. I look forward to reading your comments! Thanks for letting me share.
