Personal Accountability is Central to Businesses Failure

There are a good number of reasons why businesses fail. Well, at least they appear to be different reasons. They tend to center around one aspect of operating an independent business: Personal accountability.

The major thing I've learned, being honest with myself, is: I'm responsible for my businesses failure, either implicitly or directly. No business "HAS" to fail! It may have to adapt, to change, to evolve, but they never "have to" fail.

In discussing these this fine, yet crucial, point I'd like to point out that if you're looking into a small business of your own you don't have to fail either. Feel free to learn from my mistakes. It's much more cost-effective than making all of your own.

In one of my previous businesses, my primary objective was to sell advertising. Some days, my reactions to the inevitable rejection were so immature and unprofessional that, looking back, I'm actually quite shocked that the person making the bad choices and myself are the same. Challenges occur all the time. Resistance to sales, at least when first calling on the prospect, is to be expected and even welcomed. The prospects objections, if looked at with a "positive" frame-of-mind, are found to be the very selling points that need to be addressed by the salesperson.

Was I putting forth my best sales efforts? Was I even putting in enough sales attempts? Sadly, no I wasn't. But this only brings to mind the understanding of: "If it is to be, it is up to me."

What if it's not a sales-based situation (ultimately it always is...but that's a whole 'nother story)? Is it a situation with employees? Family? Government regulations? Well, barring the calamities of life itself (acts of nature, criminal acts, et. al., from which even those things we can recover with proper preparation) any businessperson must understand that they need to be prepared for the unseen and they must integrate as many systems towards profit as is necessary to make their business profit.