If you watch business shows on TV either Shark’s Tank or Dragon’s Den you will have seen Robert Herjavec sitting on chair 5 and offering good advice and sometimes offering money. Mr. Herjavec was written a book called Driven – How to Succeed in Business and in Life published by HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2010.

Chapter 13 Learn from Failure, Profit from Change

Experience may be a good teacher, but its lessons are often painful. The best way to dull the pain of a business failure is to isolate the cause, identify the lesson learned, and change your policies, strategies, or processes to deliver future sucesss.

Why Businesses Fail:

• Undercapitalization – most companies start on a shoestring with insufficient capital to grow by taking advantage of opportunities. The fact many entrepreneurs overestimate the degree of success makes the problem even worse.
• Lack of industry experience – every year you are in business you have learned how to do things correctly and avoid doing things wrong.
• Lack of management experience – it is easy to identify the wrong way to manage a company, it is more difficult to identify the correct way to manage one and to implement all the ideas you know.
• Poor record-keeping and financial control – you may think you are doing well, but until you gather the necessary data and know how to evaluate it, you are driving blind through a blizzard.
• Ineffective planning – the most successful companies achieve greatness by developing plans and strategies communicating them to key members of their organization and aiming for performance targets.
• Inadequate education – education helps reduce the incidence of failure
• Poor staffing – successful companies have talent from top to bottom of the organization
• Unwise product/service timing – Timing really is everything.
• Unwise economic timing – you have a better chance of succeeding in business when the economy is growing.
• Unwise personal timing – youth brings energy, but age brings wisdom.
• Lack of marketing skills – you need to sell your product
• Lack of partners – if you can locate a partner who is strong in the skills you are weak in, you enhance your possibilities.

Chapter 15 Your Customers Always Come First

Rules of Waitering That Apply to Business

• You do not get to choose your customers – all restaurants seat diners to fill up the general area, not according to the skills of the waiter. Learn to accept that some people will be more satisfied than others. Selling to people who share your interests is easy. Selling to people whom you have nothing in common is not, but it is necessary.
• The customer is not always right – it is more important to make the customer feel good. Lots of things can happen at a restaurant but ensuring the person left feeling positive is the key. A free dessert and sincere show of concern help greatly.
• The most important to improve customer service is the person serving the customer. Most people do not want to deal with the manager, they want to focus on someone who understands their concern and can solve it on the spot.
• The buck stops at the customer service person. Good waiters accept responsibility when things go wrong, even though it is clearly not their fault.
• Rudeness loses. Being rude to customer even though they are rude is not good, but managing to be pleasant and civil in the presence of rudeness can provide surprising rewards.
• Never appear overwhelmed even when you are. People value coolness under pressure.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the good thing about these companies is that they should be able to learn from the failures. Not everything they do will be successful, although there is no reason why the metrics should not be seen early to avoid losing too much. All companies must sell their products or services – continuing to improve is the key issue.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.