BAD BUSINESS DECISIONS AND WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THEM 7 Business Mistakes
#7hacks #dragonsden #Entrepreneurship

1. Focus On The Future
By the late 1970s, photography company Kodak employed 60,000 people.They had a 90 per cent share of the film market and a 85 per cent share of the camera market. In 1975, an engineer built the first version of a digital camera and the firm, which was founded in New York in 1880, recognised the potential and it invested in its development. Crucially, bosses were scared to launch it as they didn’t want to move away from film and paper, and by the time they did in the mid-1990, the digital revolution had well and truly clicked ahead without them. The firm never recovered and 50,000 jobs were lost. This is a picture perfect example of not seizing chances when they are offered, of being complacent and forgetting the world moves on – with or without you.

2. Full Stream Ahead
Remember actually leaving your house to watch a film? Yip, going to a video store renting a movie, taking it home and then watching it? It sounds almost unbelievable to a generation who have grown up on downloaded and streamed films but rental store Blockbuster had an annual revenue of $5.9billion a year. In the 1990s, a little-known company called Netflix offered to team up with Blockbuster to launch an online and mail DVD service for the tidy sum of $50million. Blockbuster refused and disappeared completely in 2013. Meanwhile, Netflix is worth $152.7billion today. Lesson we can learn: don’t dismiss a smaller rival. Think what they can bring to your business and vice versa if you can work together.

3. Ring The Changes
Not just a genius inventor, Edinburgh-born Alexander Graham Bell was also a pretty shrewd businessman. He patented his telephone invention in 1876 and offered to sell it to telegram company Western Union for $100,000. Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t see its potential and refused. After it caught the imagination of the public, Western Union tried to copy it and was promptly sued for breach of intellectual property. Bell Telephone went on to dominate US telecommunications for a century. What can we learn? If you’ve got an idea you believe in, like Alexander did, keep going. Oh, and make sure you sort out the legal side so no one can steal it.

4. Buzzing With Excitement
Back in the early days of the internet, there was no Google. Excite.com was a portal that posted information about the day’s news and weather. Its owners turned down the chance to buy Google for $750,000 from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin because they just couldn’t see it catching on. Google at the time I researched this video was worth $110billion. I don’t actually blame Excite.com for turning Google down. It was unproven and nothing could have predicted the success it would become. However, it’s a reminder that sometimes a gamble is worth it. You just need to calculate the risk.

5. Sweet Taste Of Success
When Steven Spielberg was filming E.T., the studio asked Mars if they could feature M&Ms in the flick. Mars weren’t convinced the film about a boy and his alien pal was going to be a hit, so they refused and Reece’s Pieces were used instead. Hershey agreed to spend $1million promoting E.T. on its products in return for the rights to use the film’s characters. Two weeks after its release in 1982, sales of the sweet treat had tripled. A perfect example of thinking outside the box when it comes to marketing. Oh, and don’t turn down an Oscar-nominated director if he wants to put you, or your products, in his next film.

6. Space Invaders
Back in the days before Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat, we had MySpace as the first social networking site. It was massive and in 2005 was the fifth most viewed web domain in the US. It was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp that year for $580million but was soon crammed with ads and users ditched it for the up-and-coming Facebook. It was sold in 2011 for £35million, but to his credit Murdoch said “we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons”. Ironically, he did post this on Twitter but at least he admitted his mistake and was willing to learn from it. Every entrepreneur will inevitably have an error of judgment at some point but the important thing is not to be defined by it. And, of course, not to do it again.

7. Beatle Mania
A hotly-tipped four-piece from Liverpool were rejected on the first of January, 1962, by record label Decca because “guitar groups are on the way out” and “they had no future in showbiz”. Unfortunately for Decca, the group was The Beatles and they went on to become the most influential and best-selling band in history. Three months after this rejection, they signed a deal with EMI’s Parlophone label and, well, you know the rest. What lessons can we learn from this? It’s a sickener, the one that got away. Probably best to gloss over it, move on and forget it ever happened! business mistakes

свернуть