Kingsley Umeh: 8 Reasons Why Businesses Fail in Nigeria & How to Avoid the Pitfalls

Kelvin had this great business idea that he’d been thinking of for the past few months.
He then decided to venture into this business. He did all he could; starting from writing a business plan, raising money for his business, registering his business, getting a location for his business, and he started running his business fully.

In 3 years Kelvin has been making money from his business and this got him excited. Now, he has started experiencing low sales in his business; customers and clients are no longer patronising him like they  once did. In fact, he is having trouble paying for his office space, and even staff salary.

Some entrepreneurs are experiencing the business challenges Kelvin is going through, but don’t give up on your business so soon, there are solutions to every problem. In this post, I will be listing 8 tangible reasons why your small business fails, and the things you need to do in other to bring your business back to its normal shape.

Poor Financial Management
Small businesses fail due to the fact business owners can’t manage their business finance – in terms of irregular or over spending. Improper management of your business finance can be a loophole to your business and it will also hinder your business growth potential.

Ensure that what are you spending is mainly focused on your business development. Cut off every unnecessary expenditure.

Wrong Business Location
Your business location can determine if your business succeeds or fails. Locating your business where your product or services are not needed is not such a good idea. This will result in low business sales.

Select a perfect business location where you know your products or services will be highly needed. If it is possible to relocate your business to another ideal location, please do it – to avoid wasting your business resources. Study the environment where you want to situate your business and identify what the customers need the most.

Lack of Focus
Jumping from one business to another is not such a good idea. I see so many entrepreneurs engaging in more than one business, in order to make more money. Some, later on, ended up losing their funds to those businesses.

Don’t be like them.

Find the business you are passionate at, and focus on the business. It’s much more preferable to be an expert at one business rather than an amateur at five different businesses. The business meaning of FOCUS is Follow One Course Until Successful.

Inability to Compete
Someone else is probably already in your line of business. If you are not competitive enough, you are out of business.

Business competition is about the survival of the fittest, so be ready to adapt and also be on a competitive edge with other similar business. Some of the proven ways to compete with other similar businesses are, selling of quality products that your business rival don’t offer. Also, you can utilise effective advertising and marketing strategies to make more sales.

Lack of Personal Growth
As an entrepreneur if you claim to know everything about a business, I am sorry to disappoint you, you don’t. You want to be a great and also an influential entrepreneur, but you don’t read business books, attend business seminars and taking a various online business course. How do you want to improve yourself without self-development?

As an entrepreneur read as much as you can. If Warren Buffet can read between 600 and 1000 pages per day, then why can’t you? Another way to improve yourself as an entrepreneur is to watch movies specially designed for entrepreneurs, movies like Nightcrawler, The Godfather, Office Space, The Aviator and The Social Network.

Inability to Retain Customers
Customers, like they say, are the backbone of your business. If you are the type that doesn’t know how to make customers keep coming back to your business, then you will experience low sales and poor business growth.

Try as much as you can to keep in touch with your old and new customers – either by getting to know their residential address, collecting their phone numbers and email addresses, after sales purchase. Contact them when you have new products or services in stock.

Not Seeking Help
If you are the type that wants to claim to be a perfectionist by not seeking the support of others in your industry, be ready to experience backwardness in your business growth.

Seek the help and support of the relevant business persons like the mentor, expert, peer, investor and the local talent. Not only will they make your business grow, but they will also show you how to handle situations that arise in the course of business.

Untrusted Employees
Another reason why a small business fails is that trust among sales workers is at zero level. How do you expect such business to thrive when they are not in trusted hands? This is another area you should never ignore, if you want your business to succeed.

Once you notice that you don’t trust your workers, then do the needful by replacing them with more trusted workers that will be able to help achieve your business goals and objectives. When choosing any worker, conduct a background research from the past business organization he or she had worked with, to know the kind of person you are dealing with.

Take strategic plans when you notice some of these small business failures and make amendments where necessary, in order to enhance your business growth in the long run.

I wish you success!

Photo Credit: Milkos | Dreamstime.com