Interestingly, Dr. Rhodes says that the first five laws all must be fulfilled to ensure business start-up success. With them the business has a much great chance of success. Businesses that do succeed without the first five laws of entrepreneurial marketing are the exception, not the norm.

The First Five Laws include:

Law of the Angle.

Law of Pain or Opportunity.

Law of the Sweet Spot (the Blue Ocean).

Law of Specialization.

Law of the Neighbor.

By Nate Nead.

Image by dan taylor.

1. Bad initial concept.

2. Inadequate planning.

3. Failure to do proper research.

4. Insufficient capital.

5. Poor cash management.

6. Lack of business domain specific knowledge.

7. Chasing any potential sale.

8. Late billing and collections.

9. Lack of focus.

10. Lack of internal control systems.

11. Hiring the wrong people.

12. Reliance on few suppliers or customers.

13. Not having enough perseverance and resilience.

14. Insufficient performance metrics.

Perhaps the two most important to this list are: bad initial concept and improper planning. Better to avoid a bad concept and poor planning than to get started, get down the road somewhere and realize you not only are in the wrong place, but that you shouldn’t have been there at all in the first place.

Finally, it’s much better to learn and apply the information gleaned from this article than to actually make the mistakes yourself. The latter would be much more painful and time consuming.

Image by rick.