A roller coast that never stops and the track keeps changing

May 08, 2016 2:12 PM

Academic journals, financial publications and business magazines love to remind us how many small businesses fail within their first five years. Or even their first year.

And they chalk it up to the usual entrepreneurial suspects, including insufficient capital, poor location, high overhead, tough competition, low sales, inventory mismanagement, bad accounting, operational mediocrity and dysfunctional management.

All of which are probably true. But the media misses the big picture. The human picture. The fact that most small businesses fail because the owners come to the conclusion that it’s just not worth the effort relative to the return they are receiving.

That’s what kills the company. Exhaustion. Diminishing returns. The devastating highs and lows. And working yourself to the point of burnout and exhaustion.

Just ask anyone who’s tried running a business for a few years. Most will tell you that it’s like a roller coaster that never stops, except the track changes every six months, and you’re the only one riding it.

Look, we all know starting and running and maintaining a small business is hard. But let’s not over intellectualize the owner experience, externalizing failure to tidy list of corporate buzzwords we were taught in business school.

Odds are, if the company died, it’s because the entrepreneur was out of life.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you ready to endure the failure that growth requires?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

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Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com