Is Your Business Going to Make It? How Can You Tell?

If you had $100 to invest, where would you put it: in a new business or in a slot machine?

According to data, the slot machine is a safer ?investment!? Here are the odds of success for a new business or a new idea from a big business: big company (2 year survival): 25%, small company (5 year survival): 25%, venture capital selected idea: 10%. Compare this to the fact that, by law, a slot machine is guaranteed to pay back 32% of the time!

It?s funny, today the advice and expertise available to us is unprecedented in the known history. Yet, the rate of failure of businesses is the worst ever. In 1961, less than 50% of the new businesses failed. In 1972 the percentage was a little over 60%. In 2000, 98% of the new businesses failed!

What?s going on? Where are we going wrong in managing our businesses? Consider this answer: we have lost confidence in ourselves. The more we trust the experts to run our businesses, the less we trust our own gut and instinct. And there in lies the problem.

May be that?s the reason why most of us try so hard to be just like our competitors! It?s absolutely crazy when you think about it. We start a business all excited with a great idea. It?s unique, it?s different and it gets our juices flowing.

We do some marketing. Then we realize that people are not responding to our marketing. Not as much as we like any way. So we add a new service or product to our business that our competitor is selling. Then we repeat this process, over and over again.

Pretty soon, people can?t tell us apart from our competitors. We look exactly like them! Worse, a part of us starts to die. We start killing our passion just to survive in business. Pretty soon, we don?t like our business. Still, we feel that we don?t have a choice. We have to keep going just because there is no other way to stay in business.

Is there a way to return from this path? Well, there is. And the answer is simpler than you think. But it?s going to require some courage.

The answer is simply to go back to the design table and figure what makes us different from our competition. Think about this question: What is one thing that your business does that no one can do in the world, no matter how hard they tried?