Many people dream of a working from home at hours to suit themselves,
and every year thousands of them take the plunge and start their own online
business.Most of these businesses
fail.As with small businesses
everywhere, there are many causes: loss of interest, too little finance, not
enough knowledge.But with online
businesses there is one factor that leads to more failures than all the others
combined – planning - or rather the lack of it.
Surveys repeatedly show that people with their own online business do
not do enough planning, and many do none at all.Of course, poor planning is responsible for
many offline businesses failures too.But there are factors in online businesses that lead people to disregard
the need for planning.They see it as
irrelevant and unnecessary to online working, and this attitude seems to be
linked to a number of features of working on the web.
People see working on the web as not ‘real’ work and their own
businesses as not ‘real’ businesses.This is a generalisation of course, but it is a very common
attitude.They simply do not regard what
they do as truly building something for the future, something that will
last.Because, for the most part, their
businesses do not have premises, staff, machinery, vehicles or, above all, speech
contact with customers and clients, somehow the reality of what they are doing
fails to get through to them.
The instant nature of the web is a frequently reported factor.A few minutes browsing domain names followed
by a few more purchasing their domain and the new businessman or woman has a
business.At this stage they may have
only the vaguest idea of what the business will do, or none at all.They have a name for the business and can
broadcast it to anyone without the need to think about stationary, billboards,
signs.The same goes for what often
passes for an ‘advertising campaign’: a few free adverts in online classifieds
and an article or two and the job seems done.There are of course many advantages to the ‘instant web’ and the
marketing and business opportunities it gives, but the very ease with which it
can be used leads newcomers to think that no planning is necessary.
People entering a search for business opportunities into any search
engine soon find their email inbox full of get rich quick schemes.Some of these are from the great internet
’gurus’ who can consistently turn their schemes into large amounts of cash, and
often can do the same for their subscribers.Most are from lesser beings whose one-off schemes are unproven and
probably cannot be reproduced.They all
promise huge rewards, in a short time, for little effort.For most newcomers these are just a
distraction.They cause them to jump
from one scheme to the next with little sense of direction or purpose.They are left wondering what it is they
should be doing when they get different messages from different gurus, real and
pretend.Evidence shows that if
newcomers are attracted by these schemes, they should pick one and stick to it.For most businesses, however, the right
course of action is to ignore the schemes as distractions and to have, and stick
to, their own business plan.
Free business information, free advertising and free give-aways offer
huge advantages to newcomers starting their own business online.Businesses can be started and run for very
little money, and one of the great hurdles for new offline businesses, getting
enough start-up and working capital, is often not a factor online.But the downside is that newcomers can assume
they will get most things for nothing and the rest cheaply.They are lead to believe that financial
planning is not something that is necessary for an online business.If they start with very little capital, they
fail to invest cash or return some of their profits to grow the business.Most things that can be done for free online
can be done better with the investment of some money.This fact is lost on many new online
start-ups.As a result, many businesses that
fail to plan their finances fail to grow in the way their owners expect and are
shut down.
A similar factor is the low quality of many of the software products
offered online.Alongside the many
excellent ebooks and software solutions for sale, there are many poorer quality
items that are acceptable as feebies, but bound to disappoint anyone who has
paid cash for them.Newcomers often do
not recognise that what costs them nothing or very little is worth the same or
less to any customer.They fail to plan
their range of products and fail to invest in quality products that will please
their customers and have them coming back for more.
The famous, offline, marketing guru, Peter Drucker, has defined
marketing as “the whole firm, taken from the customers’ point of view”.Many online business start-ups do not plan
their ‘image’, even though it is the most important asset, or defect, of any
business.Image is in everything a
business does, from the style of its web pages and adverts to the products it
offers and the service it gives its customers.Newcomers starting their own business should put ‘image’ at the
forefront of their planning.They must
also remember that the image they plan should be the image that the customer
wants to see, the image that will draw them to make a purchase and come back to
purchase more.
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