“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
– Winston Churchill: Former British Statesman
You need to be able to determine what you can and can’t control. Focus on the areas that you have influence over. If you only have 20% control over a certain factor, why would you spend 80% of your time focusing on it? When you give the equivalent amount of focus to something, in regard to the amount of control you have over it, that is when you will start to see results.
This section provides an overview of the most typical factors leading to a startup’s failure or success. The factors will be divided into two:
- Internal Factors
- External Factors
Internal Factors
As an entrepreneur, you have almost complete control over the internal factors for startup success. The onus is upon you to cultivate your knowledge and put together the right team. Moreover, it’s your responsibility to choose the best possible time to realize your business idea. Some of these internal factors include:
Your Personality
Contrary to popular belief, personality has a lot to do with your success as a business owner. If you have a growth mindset, you’ll find that you will view certain difficulties as challenges rather than obstacles. Now, this isn’t to say that every single difficult situation is going to present you with an opportunity for growth but, more often than not, they will. A fixed mindset is very much a victim mindset. If you’re the type of person that feels like things are always happening “to you”, then you may have a fixed mindset.
Look, I don’t want you to beat yourself up. A lot about our personalities stems from childhood. There are certain reactionary behaviors that we were exposed to as children which will have either built up a problem-solving or a problem-spotting mentality. The great news for you is that whatever mental difficulty you have in addressing challenging situations can be altered with practice.
Creating a Growth Mindset
We all have weaknesses – flaws if you will – in terms of our personalities. The fastest way for you to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset is for you to acknowledge those weaknesses. No one is perfect and if you’re caught up thinking that you are, you’re on a slippery slope to your own demise. What’s worse is that you could end up saddling yourself with debt and crashing a potentially profitable business in the process.
Without a shadow of a doubt, there will be curveballs thrown your way throughout your entrepreneurial journey. While following the tips in this guide is going to minimize the impact of those curveballs, it’s not going to stop them from coming. What you need to do is commit to improving your own state of mind so that you can address those challenges without being overcome or overwhelmed by them.
Once you’ve acknowledged your own potential pitfalls, set to work on addressing them. Whether you seek advice from a mentor or you work on them by yourself, don’t allow the dust to settle on them. Prioritize learning to enhance your ability to deal with life’s challenges. Accept constructive criticism, but take criticism with a grain of salt if it’s coming from someone you wouldn’t normally turn to for advice.
On one hand, your personality is decisive on how you handle employees and how you negotiate with other businesses. On the other hand, your personality will impact your business because of your influential position. You are the one who makes strategic decisions based on your sense of reality. Ultimately, this affects the success or failure of the business.
Timing
Timing is another internal factor that you have quite a fair amount of control over. In the case of social networking giant, Facebook, we can see how the issue of timing is relevant even for established enterprises. Due to laws and regulations, the company is not allowed to enter the Chinese market. Despite various efforts and meetings with government officials, Facebook remains inaccessible by China’s online community. More importantly, because of Chinese competitors such as WeChat and Weibo, Facebook’s entry into the market is hopeless at this point. As a startup entrepreneur, you have to analyze the current market situation, competition, and statistical trends before launching your business.
External Factors
As mentioned, there are certain factors that you won’t have a shred of control over. These could anything from political factors to economic factors. It’s important to plan around these factors. Don’t try to work against them because it will prove futile. Swim with the current rather than against it. Let’s have a look at some of the external factors that will affect your business.
Economic Environment
The economy waxes and wanes over time. There will be economic downturns as well as years of good growth. Understanding the industry in which you intend on operating will allow you to assess how well or how poorly it does during each of those seasons. Moreover, it will allow you to craft an informed plan of how to deal with economic downturns.
Social Environment
This is comprised of the values and beliefs of the general public as well as their wants and needs. You cannot change how people behave or how they wish to spend their hard-earned cash. What you can do is align your product or service in a way that speaks to those values, beliefs, wants, and needs.
Competitive Environment
Almost as soon as you’ve launched your business, you will find your product or service in the crosshairs of someone else with the desire to enter the market. You cannot control how many competitors you might end up going up against, but you can control how formidable of a competitor you are. Stay up to date with current trends. Try to learn more about what makes your customers tick and what the emerging competition might be trying to do differently from you. If you stay at the forefront of research, you will always be at the cutting edge within your industry.
Legal Landscape
Think back to the Facebook example that we looked at earlier. Now, think about the magnitude of Facebook as a business. It has a tremendous amount of buying power as well as influence over the market, but there is absolutely nothing that it can do to sway the legal environment in China. If you intend on rolling out a service that will target customers abroad, consider the legal implications. If anything, it would be best to get a good footing on home soil before attempting a rollout to other countries. By the time you’ve established yourself in the local market, you’ll have far more knowledge about the industry and you will most likely have more resources. You can then put those resources towards a legal research team.
While you’ll have very little control over external factors, you can control how you respond to them. Part of that response is your product or service offering. Make sure that you’re tailoring your brand and your offering in a way that works with the current external factors. If you can get to grips with that, you can move on to assessing your competition.
