From the horses mouth (SMB Consulting Failure Factors)

Yesterday I wrote about the fact that there is a lot we can learn from people that failed in business because books are often written by people that win talking about how awesome they are, not by those that fail and why they failed. No matter how awesome the winners may feel, we all have issues in our organizations – some that we are aware of and some that we have not yet identified.

I got a lot of email yesterday and have tried to categorize it as quickly as I can. Most people listed multiple reasons for closing. All listed poor economic circumstances leading their clients to scale down IT spending. Here are others:

43%: Not enough time/money/resources spent on marketing/selling

27%: Disorganized, lost client base to competitors or economy

13%: Made more money as an IT employee than a startup

Among other issues people listed overspending for PSA/RMM tools that broke the bank, poor hires, clients not seeing the value in their services, etc.

Interesting factors:

– Most people blamed themselves for going under.

– Nearly everyone had more than one issue/problem.

– Nobody mentioned lack of training / skill / competency.

– Everyone mentioned “money” as a factor.

– They still read Vladville? WTF! 🙂

I’ll make my point again for those that skimmed through yesterday’s posting.

Everyone has issues in their business which are problematic and when they go unchecked or unresolved for long enough lead to catastrophic failures. Most people are aware of the issue but refuse to look at the ugly stuff because.. well.. it’s depressing and there are few cheerleaders for the CEO.

I think the bottom line is whether you like what you are doing or not. If you like what you do, you have to take the good with the bad and constantly work on improving yourself. That ought to be all the motivation you need, just imagine what you’d do with your time otherwise.

* Ridiculously small sample size – I scanned through about 100 emails. Still, interesting to see so many similarities.