Here are a few reasons why Businesses can be unsuccessful
Specialisation
- No mission, no clear goals, stated objective to make a pile of money.
- Customer not perceived as a top priority.
- Loss of momentum in sales, poor sales performance.
- Impatience, trying to get rich quickly.
- Operating outside own area of excellence, diversification into non-core businesses.
- Failure to focus on priorities, failure to focus on the 20% that delivers the 80%.
Differentiation
- Failure to establish competitive advantage, such as: better quality or cheaper or faster or nicer etc.
- Product not suited to customer requirements.
- Poor quality of product and support.
Segmentation
- Failure to identify customers.
- Reactive rather than proactive selling
- Incomplete marketing strategy, poor sales programme.
Concentration
- Poor leadership, lack of integrity and competence of key staff, lack of commitment and persistence.
- Mismanagement of working capital.
- Failure to analyse and respond to trends, changes in the market place.
- Failure to control overhead drift.
- No business plan
- Inadequate financial records, poor budgeting, poor cash control.
- Action without planning, failure to collect relevant facts.
- Paralysis by analysis, too much analysis, not enough action.
- Poor relations with staff and employees, poor communications, command and control mentality.