4 Pitfalls to Look Out For To Build A Non-Reliant Business

Businesses are not isolated. They are part of larger systems of economics. You need to develop a mutual understanding with fellow businesses and develop a common cause. You’re relatively a small player, despite how successful your company is, in a field that is much bigger than your company. In the big picture, the economy is bigger than everything else put together.

That obviously doesn’t mean that you venture too far in the opposite direction, and forget to see your business as a self-sustaining one with an ability to stand on its own. You should always be careful about not becoming too dependent on any company, system or even individuals.

Here are some of the potential things to watch out for.

One Lucrative Client

We all know first-hand how motivating it is to receive that one important and big order that takes our company into the next level. After working hard for many years, your toiled hours would have started to pay off their benefits and you finally see for yourself  some big numbers to show up in the profits columns of your financial accords. Congrats! Take some time to celebrate and move past that. You should always be aware  and conscious about not putting all your eggs in one single basket.

If you don’t put the required amount of effort in all your other comparatively smaller projects, then you’ll be setting your company up for failure. Your one big client shouldn’t contribute to more than 50% of all your revenue.

Your company will be in huge trouble if they decide to stop using your services and if you don’t have any more clients in your clientele. It doesn’t matter how lucrative a client is, you should always be prepared for the worst..

Think and Grow Organically

In the early days of your company’s growth make sure that you grow organically, slowly growing with what you can handle. If you luckily land up one lucrative order even before you’ve set up the necessary systems in place to process that project then proceed to do just that and not after procuring new clients, then you’ll be struggling with the scale.

You might be able to do that one job really good, which will organically take you to other connected clients slowly down the line, giving you some breathing room to scale your systems as well. Think and Grow organically, naturally which is much better than an inflated growth. If you feel that a client would be too much for your company to handle, then it probably is, and it might do your firm more damage than good in the long run.

Your Inhouse Systems

It’s not only the clientele that you can end up being too reliant on. You can dig your own grave by being too reliant on the systems that enable your teams to do their job. For example, if you are using a licensed software that is an indispensable part of your business workflow, then what would happen to your business incase the software company that produces it announces bankruptcy and quits business and is no longer able to provide the software?

If this seems like a possibility to you, then you should invest in source code escrow services, which would help you access the source code of the concerned software provided the vendor goes under.

Also take a careful look at where you store your most important documents. Are they stored only on a physical hard drive? Think about the scenario where the hard disk is inaccessible due to hardware failure. You should be thinking about the cloud as well. The best practice would be to back up everything, over different platforms and devices as well.

Marketing Strategies

There are a huge number of small companies in the market who consider Facebook and the rest of the social media big players like twitter etcetera as one of their main ways of marketing to new audience.

This could be considered fine for now but social media is not a very sustainable way to get the word out to the world. Never forget that there is possibility that these systems could one day become obsolete. Facebook as you know won’t be here forever as it is, no matter how sure we might think on the otherwise.

Your company should always be on the lookout for new ways to be able to market your product or the services you offer. Keeping it diverse and mixing it up, like posting a video in YouTube, a Facebook post there, a blog post and then a newsletter to tie it up, and so on.

If you end up building a very strong Facebook fan following only for your account to be deleted in the future(which is a high possibility), then luckily you’ll have many alternatives to continue building on and not having to start from scratch. Don’t jeopardize your company’s success by putting all your eggs in just one giant corporation’s basket.

I hope this article educated you a little bit on building a business that isn’t very reliant on other business and systems. Let us know if you have any doubts through the comments and we would be more than happy to help you out.