how can i start my own internet business and business plan mistakes to avoid
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Published Date:16-07-2017
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SMALL BUSINESS
SUCCESS GUIDE
5 COMMON MISTAKES
That Keep You From Business Success
Prepared by:
Val G. Dille, CPA
www.DilleCPA.comCONGRATULATIONS
Welcome to Small Business Success. Once you’ve been through this guide,
you should know where to focus your time, energy, and money to build a
better, more successful business. This is the next step in your business
success story.
INTRODUCTION: BUSINESS SUCCESS
When learning the 5 Common Mistakes that keep you from Business Success,
it is helpful to first identify what Business Success means to you. Some
entrepreneurs have defined it as achieving independence, control, or the
freedom to work when they want. Others have defined success as building
relationships, making something out of nothing or just plain getting rich.
Success may be unique to your situation; perhaps a certain number of sales,
expanding the size of your organization, providing for your customers what
they need or being able to retire without worries.
Regardless of how you define success, two major ingredients needed to
achieve it are time and money. The two are linked together: money will come
as a result of the effective use of your time and time will be available as you
effectively manage your money. The impact on owners who fall susceptible
to these 5 Mistakes is quite contrary; they end up wasting a lot of time,
squandering money, and never really grow their business.
To achieve business success, you need to be proactive by striving for it.
Don’t let the day-to-day running of a business get in the way of building
lasting success.
5 COMMON 5 COMMON MIST MISTAKES AKES
That Keep That Keep Y You From Business Success ou From Business Success 2 2
www www.DilleCP .DilleCPA A.com .comOur goal in writing this guide is to help business owners identify the 5
mistakes that are hindering their growth and take 5 proactive steps that will
lead to success.
Reversing these mistakes in your business, will put you well on your way to
business success and more, you will also have:
• Better knowledge to make informed decisions
• More confidence when investing in your business
• A better team to develop your business
• & Extra time to do what you love.
MISTAKE 1 - Erroneous Assumptions
The first mistake hindering business success is erroneous assumptions.
Plain and simply put, business owners make assumptions that are not
correct. It may be excused to be the nature of an over zealous entrepreneur,
however, taking on a project that you don’t fully understand or spending your
advertising budget on an unproven media is a flat out gamble. If you have
a tendency to believe things that are not true, do things the way you always
have just because you’ve always done them that way, or make decisions
based on a gut feeling rather than solid research, it is time to reconsider the
way you make decisions.
Take a look at your business to identify erroneous assumptions you are
currently making today. Note that most erroneous assumptions have to do
with where you focus your TIME, ENERGY, and MONEY.
One simple example is the employer whose reasoning for advertising in
the yellow pages is that he always has. Advertising is a tricky thing yet an
important aspect of your businesses success. If you have a way to track
and see the effectiveness of your yellow page advertisement, then you
can confidently spend your advertising budget without having to ignorantly
assume whether or not it is worthwhile. If you start tracking the results and
they reveal that the yellow pages aren’t helping your business, you can stop
throwing your money away on an erroneous assumption and begin exploring
other advertising methods that would actually help your bottom line rather
than drain it. Don’t do something “just because you always have”. Do things
because you know they will work.
Another example is the business owner who erroneously assumes they
can handle submitting their own payroll reports or hiring their spouse to do
the bookkeeping. Doing something you don’t fully know how to do not only
wastes your time (as discussed in mistake 5) and hinders your decision-
5 COMMON MISTAKES
That Keep You From Business Success 3
www.DilleCPA.commaking ability (as discussed in mistake 2) but can also get you in trouble.
Payroll Reports, Taxes, and other things required by the government come
with strict rules and penalties when done incorrectly. Cutting corners to save
a buck will end up costing you in more ways than one. Think twice before you
take on a task you don’t fully understand.
Keep in mind the old adage; Knowledge is power. Don’t take on a task until
you’ve done your research, you know what you are getting into and what you
are getting out of the deal.
MISTAKE 2 – Inaccurate Bookkeeping
The second common mistake feeds the first. It is having inaccurate
bookkeeping. Businesses thrive when decisions are based on accurate facts.
Your ability to make fact based decisions is seriously hindered when you have
inaccurate books. A competent Bookkeeper can provide you accurate/timely
books that will become a compass to help you navigate through difficult
business decisions. Too many business owners settle for doing their own
books or hire someone whose only experience in bookkeeping is balancing
a checkbook. Two major problems arise when you don’t have someone who
can provide you with accurate books:
1. You make overly optimistic Cash Flow Projections because you don’t
have anything to base them on.
2. You don’t make informed business decisions because you don’t have
the necessary information to base such decisions.
Poor cash flow projections will eventually cause your business to spiral into
debt and other financial difficulties. If not remedied, it could lead to bankruptcy
or closure. Obviously, there are certain expenses you must incur in order to
be in business. If you have employees, payroll is one of those expenses. If
you don’t have the money to pay your employees, they aren’t going to work.
Without employees, you would be running a one-man show that probably
couldn’t stay profitable for long. The same goes for buying inventory. If you
don’t have the funds to pay a vendor, you won’t get the product you need to
keep your shelves stocked.
Having money when you need it is crucial for a businesses success. Accurate
books will help you keep up on where your money is at all times. You as a
business owner should know on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, where your
money is, if its coming in or going out, from whom and to whom. Having the
black and white numbers, in your face on a regular basis will help insure you
stay out of the red.
Once you’ve got a grip on cash flow, you should then look to your bookkeeper
5 COMMON MISTAKES
That Keep You From Business Success 4
www.DilleCPA.comto generate action reports that will help you make smart business decisions.
A lot of business owners settle for what the industry calls ‘after-the-fact
bookkeeping’. This is where the business owner essentially throws all of
his or her bills, invoices, receipts, etc into a box until the end of a set period
when he finally sets down to figure out whether or not he made any money.
This bare minimum method does little to aide in the growth of your business.
It merely keeps your operation afloat long enough to survive, not thrive.
A lot of small businesses use the accounting software “QuickBooks”. The
name may imply quick and easy, but that does not make it so. Garbage
in is still garbage out. It takes years of training and experience to become
competent and knowledgeable in bookkeeping and accounting. Ownership
of any software does not make you a bookkeeper let alone a hard tested,
college educated, Certified Public Accountant (CPA).
CEO’s of fortune 500 companies make decisions based on accurate, timely
numbers. If you are loosing money on a certain product line or service, 12
months after the fact is too late to make an adjustment. When you have
a report that indicates sales for a certain product are on the rise, you can
immediately identify why and be proactive in duplicating this success in other
product lines. Your bookkeeper/accountant becomes a key ally providing you
with invaluable decision-making reports. As you will learn about in mistake
4, don’t settle for a bookkeeper that can’t provide you with the decision-
making reports that you need. Your job is to review these reports and put
into practice what you have garnered from them. As a business owner, you
don’t have time to figure out how to prepare these reports yourself. Don’t
waste your time struggling to prepare a report, rather, invest your time in
implementing strategies for success based on timely accurate reports
prepared by others.
MISTAKE 3 – Lack of Systems
The third common mistake business owner’s make is that they don’t see their
business as a series of processes and systems. You need to have systems
in place for everything that happens in your business, from production to
marketing to finance to sales.
If you’ve never read Michael Gerber’s book, “The E-Myth”, you need to. It
is all about systems. In the book he highlights McDonald’s great example of
creating successful systems. We could probably all agree that McDonald’s
hamburgers are average at best, yet they still manage to serve billions of
customers each year. Why is this? It is all thanks to their systems. When
someone orders a hamburger, McDonald’s employees don’t reinvent the
wheel, the employee making the hamburger has a strict set of guidelines
5 COMMON MISTAKES
That Keep You From Business Success 5
www.DilleCPA.comthat he follows to get it done right, every time.
What kind of systems do you have in your business? When an order comes
in, do you treat it exactly like the last order? If we don’t do a project exactly
the same way every time, we can’t standardize it, we can’t delegate it, and
we can’t improve it. You’ll end up doing it different every time which means
you’ll end up wasting a lot of time as well.
Creating systems holds true for more than just building hamburgers,
it has application in the way you hire employees, order products, create
advertisements, and even the way you answer the phone.
When you standardize a process, it not only saves time accomplishing the
task but also allows you to delegate the task and eventually improve it.
Great systems enable average employees to get things done in an exceptional
manner. The better the system, the better the performance you will get from
each employee. As we will discuss in Mistake 4, it is important to have
talented people working for you, but also keep in mind that as you develop
clearer systems, you will be able to employ a broader range of employees
who can easily follow your instructions. As you are able to delegate more
tasks to your employees, tasks that without a system would be impossible to
delegate, you will then gain more time to spend improving other systems and
thus building your business.
McDonalds spends a lot of time improving their current products and coming
up with new product lines. This would be impossible if it’s head chefs were
stuck working the drive-thru. Their time is best spent coming up with better
products and creating process so simple that anyone could recreate their
creations.
Your goal as a business owner should be to work ON your business, not IN
it. If you find yourself figuratively ‘flipping burgers’ day in and day out, it is
time to create some systems to delegate. The quickest way to work ON your
business is to write a system for every single thing you do IN your business.
Start today. Pick one thing you ‘would’ do, write a system for it, and pass it
on to someone else to do.
MISTAKE 4 – Not hiring the right People
One of the most difficult things for business owners to do is motivate their
employees. This problem has less to do with the employer’s ability to motivate
and more to do with their inability to hire the right people to begin with.
Another great book that I highly recommend reading is Jim Collins’, “Good
5 COMMON MISTAKES
That Keep You From Business Success 6
www.DilleCPA.comto Great.” In it he addresses the fact that very few businesses hire talent.
Two reasons given for not hiring talent are 1) we either don’t think we can
afford to or 2) we are afraid of hiring employees who might be better than
ourselves.
Being afraid of hiring smart people is a lame excuse for not hiring talent.
Many so called entrepreneurs go into business for themselves to be their
own boss. Being the boss doesn’t mean you have to be the smartest person
in the room. However, smartest person in the room is actually the one who
brought all the smart people together to use for his or her benefit. Believe it
or not, it is important to have and work closely with people who are smarter
and more skilled than you.
You either hire right or hire wrong. Hiring the wrong people who creates
a drain on the business. You end up following them around fixing all their
mistakes. They can actually end up costing you more than they are worth.
The right employee is someone with talent. They have experience. They
might appear to cost more out of the gate but will actually help build your
wealth by doing their job and helping to grow your business. When you hire
people, look for those who can take the responsibility to get things done.
People who will find a way to acquire the knowledge and experience they
need to get things done without being pushed to do so.
When you hire someone to do a job, hire someone that will do it. If you start
to realize that they aren’t going to work out, don’t make excuses for them,
they are costing you money, get rid of them and find the right talent.
The next time you hire someone, hire them for what they can make you
and not for what they will cost you. Think about the last time you bought a
computer. For a small price to upgrade, you can often double the memory,
which means you will be able to get a whole lot more done for minimal extra
cost. You wouldn’t buy a computer that didn’t have enough memory to do
what you need If you think about hiring an employee the same way, you’ll
think twice about hiring an inexperienced kid as opposed to a genius that has
the experience to get things done. Consider the minimal ‘upgrade costs’ to
be the price of getting things done.
In the last ten years, hiring talent has become easier and more affordable than
ever. The virtual world we live in helps us connect so easily with talent that
we don’t even have to clear out a closet to make room for the new employee.
You can hire talented people without committing to a full time salary or other
draining overhead expenses on things like benefits or vacation time. You can
hire talent part time. You can hire consultants who work from home. You can
5 COMMON MISTAKES
That Keep You From Business Success 7
www.DilleCPA.comeven hire companies that have entire teams of talent.
One likely example is your finance department. Every company needs good
production, marketing and finance. Those three ‘departments’ make up
the core of your business, yet most owners focus on the production while
treating marketing and finance as necessary evils. If you aren’t an expert on
the subject, simply find someone who is. Look to a company who specializes
in financial services, one who employees CPA’s, Bookkeepers and full time
Payroll Professionals. You could hire that company to become your personal
finance department for a lot less hassle than you could hire an employee
who wouldn’t bring near the same experience to the table.
Take a moment to seriously evaluate the talent you have to work with. Not
just your immediate employees but also the companies who provide services
to you as well. Take note of the talent you lack then go find the talent you
need to reach business success.
MISTAKE 5 – Wearing Too Many Hats
When you first start a business, there is no way to avoid wearing too many hats.
You are in charge of making sure you’re business is successful. This means
everything from fulfilling orders to cleaning the floors is your responsibility.
As the business grows, the many responsibilities will naturally become too
much for one person to handle, so you are eventually, in effect, forced to
hire employee’s to help lighten the load. The 5th common Mistake business
owners make is that they never fully make the transition from working in the
business to working on the business because they hold on to too many hats.
They are afraid or unable to delegate so they keep too many responsibilities
for themselves and hire employees only as a last resort.
There are really only two things a business owner should do, 1) Build
Relationships and 2) Build Systems. Sure if you are a knife maker, you
probably enjoy making knives. If you own a construction company, you
probably enjoy building things. The problem is, if you spend all your time
sharpening blades or hammering nails, you will never be able to work on
your business enough to find true business success.
When an employer wears too many hats, it is because they are repeat
offenders of mistakes 3 & 4. When a boss is over worked, it is because
he or she continually fails to hire talented people to take over his or her
responsibilities and he or she continually fails to create systems clear enough
for him to delegate the tasks at hand.
If you are a boss who is stuck scrubbing the floor at ten o’clock at night,
5 COMMON MISTAKES
That Keep You From Business Success 8
www.DilleCPA.comyou’ve got to take a hard look at what your time is worth to you. That time
scrubbing the floor is not time spent creating a successful business. In the
hour it takes you to scrub the floor, you could write a fail proof process that so
clearly identifies how to scrub the floor that you could hand it to a homeless
guy on the street and have him do it. The minimum wage you will pay him to
scrub a floor will be well worth the countless hours you free up. You will use
these freed up hours to write more systems and build more relationships (I
know this is an over simplified example, but you have to start somewhere).
Take the time to create a chart of responsibilities – a job list – for your
business. Briefly describe the responsibility of each job. Put it in columnar
format. Add a column for the name of the party responsible. At first your
name will show up on most if not all of the jobs. Challenge yourself to input
other names into the list. As you replace yourself with others on the chart of
responsibilities, your load will lighten and your time to build relationships will
expand.
Building relationships means working with talented employees to make sure
they are happy and stick with you for years to come. It means working with
vendors to ensure you get the best prices and services from them. It means
greeting your customers to ensure they are satisfied patrons for years to
come. And it means growing your customer base so your business keeps
growing for years to come.
As the owner of your business, you can’t grow your businesses when you are
stuck working in it. As you build relationships and build systems your load
will be lightened and your success will explode. It is time you trust others to
do what they are good at so you can finally take the time you need to grow
your business to success.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Val Dille owner of Dille & Associates has been serving small businesses in
Canyon County for over 35 years.
His team of Certified Public Accountants, Skilled Bookkeepers, and
Professional Payroll Specialist are dedicated to helping you succeed.
They work hard to understand your financial goals and find innovative and
logical ways to achieve them. Tax Advice, Accounting Services, Retirement
Planning, and New Business Startups are a few of the many areas in which
they excel.
5 COMMON MISTAKES
That Keep You From Business Success 9
www.DilleCPA.comOver the years, Val and his team have gained a vast amount of knowledge
and experience in accounting, management and tax services dealing with
individuals, corporations, and small businesses. In addition to being a
Certified Public Accountant, Val is also a QuickBooks Professional Advisor
with Intuit, a member of the Idaho Society of CPAs, Idaho Association of
Public Accountants, National Federation of Independent Businesses and the
US Chamber of Commerce.
(208) 467-1603
He attributes his success to the company motto, “Your success is our goal”
HOW DILLE & ASSOCIATES CAN HELP YOU
Our team is ready to help you reach your business success. Among the many
business services we provide, Streamlined Payroll and Real Time Bookkeeping
are two that will help free up your time and strengthen your ability to make
confident business decisions. Call to schedule a free consultation with Val
or one of his team members. Ask how Dille & Associates’ Key Performance
Reports will help you grow your business.
TESTIMONIALS
Here is what a few of our clients have had to say:
“I have had Dille & Associates as an accountant for 35
years, setting up our Corporation ‘Musical Instrument
Service Center’ and helping us maintain a good business
“I have had Val Dille doing my taxes for the past ten
posture through the years of expanding from Boise Valley
years, and he has been extremely helpful in getting me the
to Idaho Falls area. ‘At MusiCare, we care about you and
best refund possible every year. I know he is honest in his
your Music’, as our motto we are still in business because
business, and I know he will be sure everything is done
of the advice and support of Val Dille.”
correctly for my taxes. My mother recently moved here,
Dave Sevy - MusiCare, Idaho Falls, Idaho
and I recommended Dille and Associates to her as the best
place to get her taxes done.”
“My association with Dille and Associates is one where I
Fran G.
am very comfortable in saying, I choose not to go anywhere
but Dille’s. They are the premier accounting service in
“I received this letter from the IRS last week and wanted
Canyon County and in my opinion, are unequalled in
to thank you for deftly thwarting what I perceived as an
quality, integrity, and trustful handlings of my personal
effort to squeeze a lot of money out of me. It amazes me
business. They simply are the best at what they do, and that
how firstly they admit no error and secondly go on to make
is fulfilling the needs of their clients aims and desires.”
it sound like they solved the problem and you just helped.
Roger
They’re in another world. Anyhow, thanks again for a great
job and take care.”
“We have appreciated you caring for our taxes and
Janates K.
business matters for the last 25 or so years. We know there
are accountants and businesses that can put the numbers
on the forms, and do the math, but what has been most
helpful to us was your advice. When to buy equipment, or
sell it. Thanks again.”
Lloyd and Donna Zumwalt
5 COMMON MISTAKES
That Keep You From Business Success 10
www.DilleCPA.com117 14th Avenue South
Nampa, Idaho 83687
www.DilleCPA.com
(208) 467-1603
5 COMMON MISTAKES
That Keep You From Business Success 11
www.DilleCPA.com
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