Are you on your way to becoming an SBA failure statistic?

According to the United States Small Business Administration (SBA), about half of all small businesses will fail before their fifth anniversaries; nearly two-thirds will fail before their tenth.

What’s with that?  Why do so many talented, creative entrepreneurs fail to build long-term success?  While there are many contributing factors, here are some of the easiest, most common ways to send your business to an early grave.

1. you lack a business plan to address funding, marketing, etc. / not having done enough research to know there’s an actual demand for your product/service
2. you lack experience in the demands of creating a successful entrepreneurial venture
3. you work in your business to the exclusion of working on it
4. you focus primarily on what you expect to get, rather than focusing on your clients and what you expect to give to them
5. you do what’s easy or exciting rather than what’s important

If you were going to score yourself, how many of these warning signals would you admit to?  If it’s more than one, then how are you planning to reduce your risk of being one of those business-failure statistics?

Tune in to this Thursday’s blog post for ideas on how to increase the probability of creating a business success.

(BTW, thanks to Sean MacEntee for posting the painful failure sign in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.)

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