Its Your Money, Why Burn it?

I was editing one of the final chapters of the Market is Always Right this morning to get it ready for publishing and felt very inspired to ask a question in this week’s blog.

Right now more than 70% of new businesses don’t survive to their 3^rd anniversary.

We know from endless publications and pieces of research that in the main businesses simply run out of money because they can’t make the sales they need in order to survive. We also know that there is only one reason that companies don’t make sales – they are trying to sell something their market does not want to buy.

I find this surprising because when you consider starting a business, you pour in your passion, ambition, belief and your money to make it work. It takes over your life as you focus on your ambitions and your goals. All of this is brilliant and incredibly important, so why do so many fail to make the sales they need?

So here is the big question. While your ambitions and ideas are all great and I hope you achieve them all, what about the market’s needs?

Would it surprise you to know that in our experience and that of others a lot more than half of new businesses have nowhere near the level of market knowledge they need to maximize their chances of success?

This is quite surprising in some ways, because market research is incredibly inexpensive and you can do it yourself before you invest money in setting up the business and spending your savings on a business that is not fully developed and according to the stats, is therefore likely to fail – which is pretty much like burning your money you don’t need to.

This is not a negative post, in fact I hope you take it as a hint that there are some simple, low cost and very effective things you can do that will save you a lot of wasted money, time and stress simply by doing more to get to know your market as early as possible.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue this theme with some ideas you might want to consider when researching your market.