Running a successful business takes dedication, sacrifice, and resilience—many business owners know that it becomes their life. However, an unsuccessful business can sometimes require more dedication. Swan diving your company into the ground can be quick or take years of poor management. Ultimately, you’ll need extraordinary negligence to destroy your company, so let’s dig in and see how you can successfully fail at running a business.
Ignore business accounting and reporting
Successful businesses analyse and report on their financial data to plan, forecast, and maintain the health of their business and its activities. Most companies use accounting software to manage their finances and eliminate the busy work of manual entry, so they can focus on being efficient and effective in what they do.
When running a failing business, just don’t do it. Feel free to ignore cash flow, accounts receivable, etc. Run your business on gut feel alone, and ignore the data; ignorance is bliss.
Neglect your business presence: Become invisible
Your business is only as good as its reputation, so good companies spend resources to establish, grow, and maintain their brand. A business will use social media, website hosting, customer relationship management, and a whole suite of tools to ensure it has leads, sales, and an image its customers can recognise. As a failing business owner, it’s better to pull the plug on your internet and go off-grid.
Why have an online presence for easy customer access when you can make it a challenge and have them bushwhack to find you? Better yet, when a customer does manage to find your business and interact with you, bully them out of the store. Business would be much easier if it weren’t for those pesky customers; show them who’s boss.
Refuse customer feedback
Customer feedback is of incredible value to businesses. These are just a few things an innovative business will use customer feedback for:
- Identify issues with products and services
- Establish a dialogue with their customer base
- Improve internal procedures and future product releases
- Understand the needs of customers
But we aren’t running a successful business here, so if you see a customer, ignore them. You should snipe back at their Google review, too—that’ll teach ’em.
Employees are your enemy
Employees are the backbone of every successful company. Motivated workers who are valued and nurtured provide a thriving work environment. A happy workforce maintained by good leadership reduces staff turnover and increases your organisation’s productivity.
Of course, this is for businesses that want to thrive, but not in our case. Did you know that labour is the most expensive business cost? You’ve got a company to run into the ground! You don’t have time for payroll, work culture, and training (Links). Better yet, just don’t pay them—they aren’t going to be staying long anyway.
The ATO isn’t real
Businesses across Australia take compliance very seriously. Ensuring things like BAS and payroll are dutifully reported and maintained throughout the year is critical to a healthy business ecosystem. Rules and regulations give Aussie businesses legitimacy; without them, the country’s business landscape would resemble the Wild West. When a company doesn’t play by the rules, more often than not, it gets caught and receives consequences for it. But not you. No, our failing business is different. Who cares what a TPAR is? Contractors know the risk of working with a company with a cancelled ABN.
Stay the course and break the rules. In no time, you’ll run your business into the ground. Remember, the ATO is just a vibe.
Recap
Following these guidelines will undoubtedly cause your business to go into insolvency, bankruptcy or worse, prison. 99% of companies wouldn’t dream of operating this way, yet not all businesses actually succeed. ABS data shows that between 12% and 14% of businesses exit the market annually.
Starting a business is a life-changing endeavour for you, your family, the workers you employ, the customers you serve, and the wider community—this is why it’s essential to get it right, and sometimes that means seeing what’s wrong. So, put these unhelpful tips aside and work on running your business successfully.
