Mistakes result in lost business, time, and resources. Nobody is perfect, but it is everyone’s responsibility to minimize errors and make the best decisions possible.
Below are examples of routinely made poor decisions and big picture blunders that you can avoid as a manager, marketer, or business owner. How many of these do you routinely commit?
Failing to properly understand your market – Don’t think that because you have found success in one geographic region that the same plan will have the same or better results in other regions.
Take the time to understand your target market, how your product is positioned in that market, and how to properly communicate the benefits. Seems simple and logical enough, but even big companies make this mistake.
Legend has it that when a large American manufacturer of baby food first decided to introduce their brand in Africa, sales were sluggish. After looking into the matter, the company discovered that their trademark baby picture on the label was a hindrance because most products sold in Africa with pictures on the labels were used to communicate the contents of the package because of the low literacy rate. Whether legend or an enormous management mistake, it does serve as a reminder that not taking the time to understand who you are selling to can be disastrous.
Resisting change – Sometimes your routine and the your team’s routine need to change. In one of my previous posts, “In Bad Times, We Need to Get Back to Basics,” I describe this in greater detail, but the essential thing to keep in mind is that as a manager you constantly need to evaluate your processes and projects to determine if they are still viable. If not, and yet you continue to proceed with them, the results may not meet your expectations-.
You should keep your fingers on the pulse of your business so that if there is a shift in your market or industry, you can notice it, understand it, and make the proper adjustments.
Thinking “my product is so good it sells itself” – I think of that line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come” when I hear a business owner or sales person say that their product sells itself. It’s great to be confident and proud of what you sell, but are you sure you want to hang your hat on your confidence alone? 80% of small businesses fail within the first year of opening and I bet that none of these failed owners would have opened the business in the first place had they known it would fail by year’s end. And what is the most common mistake these failed owners make? They don’t invest sufficient time into marketing their business.
Never documenting processes (or anything else) – Let’s face it we live in a “what have you done for me lately” business culture, and as a manager you have to keep up with the competition or your business can be in serious trouble. However, the need to document and communicate processes is vitally important to the survival and growth of your organization, yet it is routinely passed up for other matters.
Documenting processes gives you the ability to standardize procedures which will help you work more productively and efficiently and train new employees. If the processes are not documented, this becomes far more difficult to facilitate. For example, perhaps you hire a new employee to work as a staff copywriter and proofreader. To begin getting the person experience and up to speed with your companies processes, you task the person to proofread all of the copy developed from the staff writers. You share the flowchart below with the new employee to understand how the copywriting process proceeds and so that he knows what to do next when he receives material for his review.
Because you have taken the time to properly document the process, the employee now has a visual representation for him to reference when the task needs to be performed. By doing this, you will find that you will spend a lot less time explaining company and team processes, and the delegated tasks will be done the correct way each time cutting down mistakes. Also, new employees will get up to speed more quickly, and seasoned employees will remain focused.
Producing results, minimizing errors, and making informed decisions are the centralized responsibilities of any manager.
