Who is Barry Mirakian?
What I am going to accomplish here is to talk to you, the small business owner, the small business employee, the entrepreneur, about business on a practical and affective level. I am not a business professor who is analyzing strategy, I’m talking common sense. But practical common sense things aren’t always apparent.
I am here to make the practical apparent. It is my belief that too many small businesses struggle or fail, unnecessarily. The statistics for failed businesses from startup are staggering. Fifty percent of all companies fail within five years of startup. Only 1 in 3, or 33% of companies makes it to ten years in business. What is the 1 lowest common denominator as to why businesses struggle and fail? I have been searching for this answer for as long as I can remember.
The Small Business Association will cite a dozen reasons startups fail; lack of capital, minimal cashflow, no sales or marketing plan. When I dig below that, when you start peeling away the layers of the onion, I find that the common denominator for all the companies I’ve seen and experience is that they don’t have a well thought out strategy.
After years of experiencing and studying this common denominator, I decided that I wanted to help small business owners to think through how to develop a strategy and plan, and then teach them how to do it on their own.
Who is responsible for that plan?
YOU ARE whether you own the company, you run the company, or are a leader in the company. It is your responsibility that a plan is developed which everyone in the company has had a part in building, that they are comfortable with, and that they can communicate around. The communications at staff meetings or casual conversations are always consistent with the strategy that you and your team will develop.
With a strong plan in place, employees can make better decisions more informed, lower-risk decisions, as a result of knowing what to do.
In the following blog posts I will talk about how to achieve your goals and how planning will result in consistent results. Make sure to check-in weekly!