10 Ways To Help Your Business Fail
Out Of Control
Everyone is always looking for ways to help their business succeed, but what if that’s not your goal? Here are 10 practices that are guaranteed to help your business or organization fail:
Cut your marketing budgets. Reduce your ad spend in order to save money. Overwork your marketing team. Tell them to ‘do more with less’.
Don’t work on or follow strategic plans. Chase after flights of fancy in your business instead of focusing on what you are good at.
Ignore the impact of customer service. Reduce staffing levels to save money. Attack morale and slash those with soft skills in your organization so that your customer experience slides away to nothing.
Never create or follow processes. Processes document the best-known ways to accomplish specific goals to help you achieve consistent results. Vehemently refuse to do this in favour of winging it and doing things ‘however it feels right’ to you on any given day.
Don’t set goals for your business, unless they are vague and impossible to track. If you never set a target, you can never miss a target.
Ignore your infrastructure. Do you have a physical location? Let it slide. Forget about maintenance. Don’t create SOPs or inspection checklists, and when things eventually break, slap them back together with duct tape. No one will ever notice.
Never take customer feedback. Just because someone has supported you for a long time doesn’t mean they know anything about what you are going through. If they don’t like it, they can go somewhere else.
Don’t learn about your industry. Don’t read about it, don’t listen to podcasts about it, don’t discover what your competition is doing, and never talk to others who are in similar businesses.
Don’t meet with your team regularly. They’ll figure out what they should do if they are any good.
Don’t worry about using capital effectively. Sure, you might have real business needs, but you should spend your money on nice-to-haves first. If it makes you feel good, you should buy it.
BONUS TIP!
Bonuse
BONUS TIP
11. Data is for chumps. Don’t collect data about your operation, and if there is free data that falls into your lap - for example, Google Reviews - don’t listen to it. Assume you know what is best at all times.
You could do all of these things - but what if you did the opposite? How could following the inverse of these rules have a positive effect?