Business can be very tough. There's highs, there's lows, there's pressure to succeed and putting out fires every single day. And there's really a reason that only some people have the guts to do it.
I've studied over a thousand businesses. And I've learned that it's not timing, it's not competition, and it's not the market conditions that cause businesses to fail. It's the deeper structural and human mistakes that slowly kill a business and make it impossible for it to be successful.
So, these are the six traps that cause businesses to fail and proven ways to avoid them. The first and most common reason why businesses fail is the whole concept of control. A lot of business owners are great at delegating pieces of their business, usually the pieces that they don't like.
But the big mistake is they never think about how they would actually replace themselves inside their business. And most people rationalize this. If you are the best at something and you enjoy doing it, why would you train someone else to be good at it?
But this is why businesses stay stuck because the owner is still doing the thing that makes them valuable and then they haven't trained someone else to do it and then they don't have time to do the things that are actually required to grow the business. They become a prisoner in this thing that they created. You see, most business owners will tell somebody to do something that they themselves aren't willing to do, which makes them hard to duplicate.
Think about it. They don't update the CRM. They're not consistent with their follow-through and they end up being stuck in the day-to-day operations because they can do just enough to get by, but it is not the right way that they would be doing it if somebody else inside their business was actually responsible for that function.
And this ultimately causes failure because the business owner doesn't have to do everything, but they end up getting stuck in the thing that they're good at. But then what happens if they get sick or they want to go on vacation or they want to exit their business? the business tends to fall apart without them.
So if this is you, here is what you do. Give yourself a title according to what you actually do every day. If you are responsible for recruiting inside your business, put that function as a recruiter because you are handling hiring.
Or if you are the most senior salesperson, think of your title instead of CEO as senior sales rep because that's actually the function that you're in. And then when you start to think about your role as the different functions that you play, you document what you do in each one of them every single day. You set targets around what you would hold somebody else accountable to if they were in that position full-time.
And then you hire and train the right person for that role. There is no way someone is ever going to be able to do everything that you do. That is why you are the business owner.
But this is how you duplicate yourself within your business so that you can let go of control of the day-to-day and start actually running and scaling your business. Next is number two, and it is a mistake that I have made over and over again. Hiring based on pressure instead of fit.
I once hired an employee extremely fast because we needed to fill the spot on the team. We didn't follow a normal interview process and I know for sure that if we had more time, we wouldn't have actually hired the person. And guess what happened?
This person ended up stealing over $10,000 from our business and of course negatively affected the team and created all sorts of chaos as soon as they got let go. So when it comes to hiring, I've learned through so many mistakes. The most important thing you can have in any company is a great team.
But a team is made up of individual team members. So the way you create a great team is by actually choosing the right people. And more importantly, when you ignore the red flags in the interview process is when you start to let down the team.
You see, it wasn't that I hired the person in too short of a period of time. I've made phenomenal hires within one week. They've gone through our three-step interview process and they did all three of the interviews on a Monday, on a Wednesday, and a Friday, and we sent them an offer letter by the end of the day on Friday.
So, it's not about the amount of time that it takes to hire the person. It's when you feel the condensed pressure that you need to hire somebody. So the people that you are interviewing, you have a lower set of expectations.
The bar went from being high. We're going to have a phenomenal team that's in alignment with our core values to we're just going to hire somebody that can fill the hole because right now there is so much pressure because the seat is vacant. And when you reduce that bar and you allow those red flags to enter into your organization, that is when the problem starts to happen.
And the more team members you do this with, the less likely that you are ever going to build a great team. So, here's the policy I suggest you adopt. If you are in the interview process and somebody says something that is concerning to you, no matter how quickly you have to hire them, do not hire that person.
Whenever I get stuck in a bind, I needed somebody and the people that we're recruiting just aren't the right fit. I just continue to tell myself and I've always made myself right on this point is that there are no shortage of great people out there who want to work with a company who is growing, who want to be a part of a team that supports them, who want to be a part of something that is truly creating opportunities where somebody would look at the decision that they made to join this team and think it was the greatest decision that they could have ever made. See, when you hold that standard up high and you don't get trapped into the muck of lowering your standards, you end up truly creating a great team, which is what allows your business to grow without you.
If you always compromise in the interview process, there's a red flag here, there's an orange flag over there, then why would you expect that your team is going to support you and allow you to duplicate yourself so that you can do other things outside of be in the day-to-day of your business? You see, I've interviewed over a thousand people over the course of my career and made so many mistakes, but have also been very successful at learning what not to do to be able to create the team that I have today with over 350 people. So, if you want access to my triedand-true interview process that I use day in and day out.
So, find me at Natalie Dawson on Instagram and DM me interview and I will send you my interview resource right away. Number three is next and it is a hard one. scaling without roles and responsibilities.
For every metric that you track in your business, you need to make sure that every person knows who is responsible for that particular metric. You should never have just a list of 10, 20, 30 metrics or department metrics or KPIs where some specific person is not tied to the result of that metric. Now, yes, as a business owner, you are ultimately responsible for all of the metrics, but at the end of the day, which role and which specific person with which specific title owns the daily, weekly, and monthly movement of that specific metric?
If you're wondering why your business is stuck, I promise if you start here, you will uncover what is at the core of your inability to scale. Because while you as the business owner own the growth of your business, you don't own every movement of your hiring. You don't own every movement of your leads coming in.
You don't own every movement of your conversion rate and you don't own every movement of your customer film it. You have to let other people have those and make sure that it is the most important part of their job function. They cannot be confused because people in any role have multiple priorities.
They wake up every day. There's all sorts of things that they have to get done. They have their personal to-do list.
They have their professional to-do list. So you have to make sure that they are crystal clear that whatever metric is assigned to them is the most important part of their success as a team member. There are countless frameworks out there that create a lot of confusion around who is responsible and accountable and consulted and informed and that might work for project planning but when it comes to the growth of a small business every metric in the business is owned by an individual person.
Do not create a lot of confusion around this. So go across each of the core metrics inside your business. You should start with marketing because that drives leads into your business.
The leads then go into conversion. From conversion, you would go into accounting because once something is converted inside your business, you likely need to ensure that this has been paid for. And then tack on whatever the fulfillment of your business is.
So that could look like ops, it could look like fulfillment, service, delivery, etc. And for each one of those sections of the customer journey, you list out the five to eight most important metrics. And those five to eight metrics are then assigned to a specific person and you ride that person every single week to ensure that they know that those metrics are important and that those metrics are ultimately their job.
Next is a mistake that most business owners make when they get to a million dollars in annual revenue. They add complexity instead of simplifying. You see, when a business owner gets a million dollars a year, they suddenly decide to start looking at a second opportunity instead of making that first thing that they had into a $10 million a year business.
And I've seen this time and time and time again. And it comes from that need to do more, to create more. But adding another venture isn't going to double or triple your income.
It's going to split your attention. So, what you actually should do is double and triple down on the existing successful business. Most business owners don't need more.
They need less done better. So, if you've successfully started and grown a business and have the itch to start something new, just pause, reset your priorities, reset your thinking, and instead focus on how you can continue to grow your existing business because this is how you'll unlock true wealth and financial success. I've worked with hundreds of business owners and the most extreme examples of this would be the dentist who decides to partner with their buddy on a restaurant.
And the less extreme but just as distracting example would be the dentist who's located in Scottsdale, Arizona, wanting to start to vacation in Tahoe. So instead of just making enough money in Scottsdale to be able to vacation whenever the hell they want in Tahoe, they have this brilliant idea to start their second location in Tahoe. Well, what do you think happens for the business owner when they expand to their vacation destination?
All of a sudden, the place that they wanted to vacation is not a vacation at all because they're now working there. And when their attention has moved off of their original location, the original location starts to decline and the new location isn't working the same way that the original one did because they don't have the same team. They don't have the same systems and processes and they aren't there all the time because they wanted to be there to vacation to begin with.
So you can start to see how all of this distraction creeps in once the first thing is successful. My recommendation is always sell the first thing. And until you are ready to sell, put blinders on.
You're not going to start a second business. You're not going to start a business in a disconnected location. You're going to put all of the gasoline onto the existing thing that you have so it can scale, so it can create wealth for you.
And once it does, then you can start being interested in doing other things. But until then, you have to stay focused and keep the main thing the main thing. Number five is next.
Most businesses fail because they are trying to solve the wrong problems. I worked with a business owner recently that claimed to need marketing help. They're spending about $30,000 a month on paid advertising and had worked with multiple ad agencies.
They were certain that they had a marketing problem. But when we looked deeper, we realized that this business didn't actually have a marketing problem. Their sales team was the problem.
They needed to be trained and have a consistent process. And the only reason we caught this is because we actually looked at the numbers. You see, I never trust that a business owner is actually solving the right problem.
And we've all been there because when you're in it, it's hard to actually take a step back and see the real problems for what they are. You're so fixated on a certain set of problems, a certain set of interests that you have in your business that you don't actually measure the other areas to know that the problem is somewhere else. This is why numbers are so important because you have to track everything in order to find out what the true problem is that's holding the business back.
And you only have so much time and you need to spend it solving the right problems at the exact right time in the right order. I spend zero time cooking, but I think of this in a cooking analogy. Imagine that you are a meatloving pasta eater and so you are perfecting the sauce and the ground beef and making sure that it is delicious and perfectly cooked.
Meanwhile, you've decided to put your noodles in a pot of water inside the microwave. Here you are spending all of your time over the stove paying attention to how much oregano you're going to put in the browning of the ground beef. Meanwhile, you're frustrated because you can't actually have a pasta dish without cooked noodles.
Everyone, even me, knows that you can't cook noodles in a microwave. So, here you show up to dinner with your family and the sauce is perfection and they're upset because it isn't a full meal due to the fact that the noodles are not cooked and taste terrible. This is the exact same way that business owners solve all of the wrong problems.
If you would have just spent a tiny bit more time paying attention to the noodles, the meal would have come out at the perfect time and it would have tasted delicious. But instead, you focus too much on one thing, entirely ignored something else, and left everybody hungry. And the last reason why businesses fail is culture.
and ignoring it until it's too late. You see, when you're growing a business, the most important thing you have to do is attract new team members. And having a fun office isn't what's going to do that.
I see business owners who prioritize happy hours or being friends with their team members, having pingpong events, and all of these substitute activities for building true culture. And true culture means that you represent the success that is possible for a newcomer as soon as they walk in the door. that success is demonstrated through how you onboard them, how you create incentives for them, how you align their goals to the goals of the organization.
And so I always say the pivotal piece of building culture is setting your team members up for success because a true leader's job is making other people's success easy. So how do you make people's success easy inside your business? Do you give them fully established process for what success looks like inside their role?
Do you give them feedback when they're uncertain of which direction to go? Do you look at the metrics that they are assigned to and actually give them coaching and feedback on how to improve things when things are going wrong versus just pointing a finger at them? Especially when a business is small, it's easy to focus so much on the client.
And I get why that's the case because if the client goes away, there is no business. So client obsession has to be there. But as you start to scale out of client acquisition being your main constraint, you realize that you have to build a team and that culture is already ingrained in your team.
So if you have a culture where things are loosely defined, where no one knows what true expectations are, where no one is really set up for success and people just have to wing it, that then becomes the foundation and the expectation that new team members are onboarded with. Well, as you grow your business, you need more sophisticated people to come in. People with more experience don't want to work in an environment where no one knows what success looks like.
And so getting in these foundational culture elements early on, not the pingpong, not the therapy sessions, but real structure in your business actually creates what you want in your business, which is structure and results and a place where people can be successful. Not just because of one person's personality, but because the business system actually works. And the only way the business system actually works is if you create it.
So, those were the six ways that most businesses fail. And I hope that this video will help you in avoid making those mistakes.
