4/03/2005

Myths About Doing Business

"There are a lot of misconceptions, myths, bad advice and outright lies about what it takes to be successful in business. And most of those are continually spread by people who have never gone into business for themselves. Unfortunately, some of them are spread by people who went into business, failed at their business, and then were looking for an excuse to shift the blame away from themselves. Regardless of where you heard them, you will no doubt be familiar with some of the following myths. You may even have been guilty of passing them along to someone else with the best of intentions. I used to believe several of these myself, but my own experience, and better yet, learning from others' experiences, I found that they were false. Let me share with you 15 of the most common myths about doing business.

In no particular order, they are:

1. To be successful you have to be first...
2. To be successful, you have to be cheaper...
3. I'm a good cook so I should start a restaurant...
4. The customer is always right...
5. If you build it, they will come...
6. It's a cool idea. Everyone will love this. That may be true, but will they be willing to spend any money on it?...
7. Ours is better so we'll be successful...
8. Adding more people to the project will make it go faster...
9. We're good friends. We will work well together / We should form a partnership...
10. Failure is bad. / Failure is the opposite of success...
11. Knowledge is Power...
12. Every customer is equally valuable...
13. Profit is all that matters in business...
14. Having more customers is better than having fewer customers...
15. Venture Capital and IPOs are good..."

Read more in this post from Ajarn's SQL Corner.