How Not to Start Your Business: a Guide to Ruining Your Chances for Success

You just got your degree, so you’re ready to face the real world. Instead of facing the competition on the market as a recent graduate who’s hunting for their first job, you decide to do things differently: start your own business and face an even greater competition. If your first attempt to start a business fails miserably, you’ll at least look like you’ve tried.

Natalya Konrad, a member of the team at EduGeeksClub, is the sound of reason. She explains that you can’t start a business without getting really well prepared for the world you’re about to face. “Without a detailed and realistic business plan, you have absolutely no chances to succeed in business. This is not an adventure you try to spice up your life. It’s a serious process of analyzing the market and the competition, planning every single step and expense, evaluating the problems and expectations of the audience, and predicting the upcoming trends. Yes, you should be passionate about the business, but your enthusiasm needs to go hand in hand with planning.”

Experts sound boring, don’t they? It would be much more fun to start a business without much planning, follow your intuition, and lead it to a disaster. Let’s see how you can do that.

The Ultimate Guide: How Not to Start Your Business

  1. Don’t bother with planning

Boring people make plans. Fun people live in the moment. Who cares about a business plan when you can just skip that process and follow your intuition when you invest all money you have? Business is all about taking risks, after all.

  1. You don’t need a special person in your life

You’re going to be an important business person, so it’s time to quit that relationship that’s holding you back. Forget all about your friends, too. They only want to hang out with you because you’re going to be rich and famous, so they want to take advantage of your potential. You don’t need people like that in your life; you need to be completely alone in this adventure.

  1. Don’t bother exploring the competition. You don’t want to be a copycat

You have the best ideas in the world. Why would you waste time exploring the tactics of mediocre competition? You already have what it takes to beat them all with your cool ideas.

  1. Push the employees outside their limits

You’re paying these people to do their jobs. If you notice they have free time for a coffee and cigarette, then you’re not using their full potential and you need to do something about that. Add more tasks to their job description, make them take some of the work home, and don’t hire a new person for a new position when you can use the people you already have to cover those tasks.

man in suit
Photo via Visual hunt
  1. Don’t be satisfied with anything less than perfect

Some of your employees didn’t read your mind and delivered a completely different presentation from the one you asked for? It’s okay to freak out and yell when you’re a boss. If you don’t ask for perfection, you’ll never get it from your workers. Push them outside their limits every single time.

  1. Who cares about passion? It’s all about the money

You’ll start this business as an adventure, but you’ll have to lose that initial enthusiasm at one point or another. You need to become a serious person with no idealistic bone in your body. Business is all about being bold, calculating, and guided by the goal of making money. It doesn’t matter if you don’t love the idea anymore; don’t do anything about it if it keeps bringing money.

  1. The customers are not happy? Don’t worry; you’ll get new ones

Some of your customers have complaints about your products or services? That doesn’t matter. If they already paid for your offer, they will have to handle the consequences of making a bad decision. You’ll get new customers who will fall for your sweet words of convincing.

  1. Be rude!

Have you seen a nice businessman? If you have, then you’ve been tricked into believing that person was nice. In reality, there’s no way for a successful businessman to be a nice person. Forget all about those lessons for personal accomplishment, inner peace and happiness. You bring important decision every day, so you’re stressed out.

You will also make a lot of money, so everyone is beneath you and you can play by your own rules. You don’t have to leave a tip at the restaurant or control your temper in front of people. You’re a free person, so you can yell as much as you want to.

  1. It’s all about business. You don’t have time for anything else

You’ve read all those business guides that suggest you to do some yoga, have a hobby, and devote time for your family. They are so funny! When you’re a businessman, you deprive yourself from sleep, socializing, and hobbies. That’s how it works, so you need to devote your whole life to this company and leave time for nothing else. If you have a heart stroke by the time you’re 40, you’ll at least know you’ve done something really important in your life: you made money and people treated you like a boss.

 

Are you ready to start implementing the 9 tips above? Congratulations; you’re about to invest a lot of money into a business and lead it to an impressive failure. When it fails, it’s okay to freak out, yell at everyone for not making your business succeed, and start looking for ads in a burger chain. With such an attitude, you’ll hardly be a fit for that job, so you’ll lose it with the speed of light and you’ll keep bouncing from one adventure to another. What a fun life to live!

If you don’t like the idea of ruining your chances for success, you can do everything opposite to the 9 steps above. Tell us how that works for you.

Article contributed by Antonio Tooley

Antonio is a marketing specialist and a blogger. He loves writing about business, SMM, education and productivity. He’s also crazy about riding his bike and bumping into new people (when he’s on foot). He will be happy to meet you on Facebook and Twitter.