Interesting thoughts about wether it’s easier to avoid things that you shouldn’t do, or to focus on things that you could do. Looking at links between causality and results of the survivors who actually made it, vs the people who didn’t. Was it really just a combination of the ‘right’ things to do, or was there something else that made them successful.
In the spirit of avoiding tragedy, I’m just going to list a few things of what not to do, that from our experience we know if we did again would probably end in the same shitty results.
Hire too many sales people with not enough leads
Only have one lead source
Let someone you don’t really like manage your team
Hire people you don’t like
Use a line of credit without closely monitoring the profit levels of jobs and then take heaps of money out of the business
Lower the price and get shitloads of volume without having operations systems in place to handle this volume
Try and run an entire business yourself with huge teams and no levels of management
Don’t give new salespeople enough training
Buy a lot of stock right at the end of your cashflow cycle and put all the pressure on the immediate next cashflow cycle to sell all the stock, especially without sales in the pipeline
Only have one salesperson
Bleed the business dry of every dollar of profit, especially if you want to grow the business
Don’t track your cost of acquisition from any of your many lead sources, and just keep the volume of them all high without knowing how your overall profit is made up
Assume you know what your doing with everything, and then make big decisions based on these assumptions
Make big decisions quickly in the heat of the moment because it’s efficient or you really just want to be done with it
Think in short time horizons with everything, business, life, all of it