When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get out of school. I didn’t dislike education, but I just felt that I should be doing things rather than learning about things; I was anxious to put my limited knowledge to use. However, now that I’m older, I understand that in order to be successful, I need to continue to learn and educate myself. Doing things is great, but it’s even better to do them the right way. You probably know what I’m talking about. I mean, here you are spending your spare time reading a marketing blog (thank you for visiting, by the way). In order to successfully learn, you need to understand the process, and find out how you can move on to the next phase as efficiently as possible. I’ll attempt to outline this process below…

1. Unconscious Incompetence: Basically, you don’t know what you don’t know. In this phase, you are doing things, and failing, but you don’t understand why. You don’t know what you’re problem is, and therefore have no idea how to fix it. Let’s use hitting in baseball as an example. You really want to hit the ball, but keep missing, and you have no idea why.

2. Conscious Incompetence: In this phase you know what you need to get better at, but still can’t manage to do it properly. Looking at our baseball example, you’ve hired a trainer, you’re reading some books, and you’ve identified why you can’t hit the ball. You’re working to correct the problem, and have some limited success, but you fail more often than you succeed. This is where practice comes in handy.

3. Conscious Competence: In this step you can succeed, but have to focus hard. When you step up to the plate, you have to think about it and make sure that you’re stance is perfect, you make sure to keep your eye on the ball, that you have proper follow-up, etc. It’s like a checklist in your mind. You have to manually check things off, and focus on doing things the proper way. You can be successful, but it’s not easy.

4. Unconscious Competence: This is where we all want to be. In the final phase, you are successful and don’t even have to think about it. You instinctively know where to put your feet, you know how to swing, and you keep your eye on the ball with no problem. This enables you to think about other aspects of the game (where you want to hit the ball, how to effectively move that base runner over, focus on specific pitches, etc). In order to get to this point, you need to understand what mistakes you were making before, understand how to correct those mistakes, and then practice.

So what does this have to do with marketing? Everything. We are living in an age where new technology and new techniques are being created daily. Customer mindsets are changing, the tools we use are changing, the rules themselves are changing. Learning is crucial to your success as a marketer. Don’t get frustrated because you fail. Push through those hard times and find out what you are failing at, and why. Then learn how to correct the problem, and focus hard on what you need to do. Before long, you will be able to move on to other aspects of business, and then others, becoming an expert and building on your knowledge.

Agree / Disagree? Let me know in the comments.

Entrepreneurs drive the business world. They are the ones that take the big risks. They move fast instead of waiting for things to happen. They are way more action oriented than other companies. They have the tenacity and drive to succeed. So why then do so many start up companies fail. There are some obvious reasons, such as the usual barriers to entry; it can be difficult especially if you are trying to go up against the big boys without a tenth of their budget. But I believe there’s more to it than that. I think many entrepreneurs are so excited to start their business that they do so without giving the process enough thought and planning. This is especially true of online businesses, where the start-up costs are relatively cheaper (the cost of a domain is much cheaper than renting an office). Here are some reasons why I think many new bushiness fail…

1. Belief that being good is all that is needed to be successful

I live in a neighborhood where many people know how to cook excellent food. Yet, there aren’t many successful “mom and pop” restaurants. Sure, I see new ones pop up all the time, but they don’t really last very long. Having visited some of these places (hey I’m all about helping local business thrive) I can tell you the quality of the food is far superior to most places. However, quality is just not good enough in this day in age. You can have the best product in the world, but it doesn’t matter if you aren’t taking care of your other business responsibilities. Little things like bringing in customers, pricing strategy, customer service, location, keeping proper hours, etc. Having an excellent product is a definite must, but don’t forget that it’s only one piece of the business puzzle. Remember the basics… play to your strengths and passions, be objective in regards to your business, and seek help from others when you need it.

2. Lack of goals

Let’s face it, this is a problem even for the big companies. The difference is that they can afford to make mistakes, you can’t. One of my favorite movies of all time is “Deep Cover” (yeah, I said it), and there’s one part in that movie where a father turns to his son and asks him what he wants for Christmas. The kid shrugs and says he doesn’t know. The father then says something like “how are you ever gonna get what you want if you don’t even know what you want.” Exactly, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Setting goals is essential in life and in business. Sit down and identify your personal goals. See where they sync up with your business goals (spend more time with your family, more money, etc), visualize what you want to achieve, and then develop a plan to get there. Set up milestones (divide your big goal into smaller objectives), and timelines to achieve these milestones. Prioritize your efforts around these goals and milestones and you will be much more focused on what is important to you. There are rules for setting goals, but I’m sure we’ll get to that in a later post.

3. No process

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is that they have no systematic processes for anything. Most of them keep everything in their head, and never commit ideas to paper. Let’s face it, business is complex. If it wasn’t then we wouldn’t have to go to school for years to learn how to do it, and you probably wouldn’t be reading my posts. Put those ideas on paper. Write out your processes, especially for some of the more complex things. This will make it easier for you to identify where things can be improved. Also it makes it easier to train others whenever you get to that point. Remember, a good business needs structure, processes, and people. You need a plan, tasks, timelines, etc to reach that plan, and people to execute it.

There are probably more things that I’m leaving out, but these are the major factors. What do you think? Why do you think so many start-up companies fail? More importantly what can entrepreneurs do to make sure they succeed?