10 Ways to Mess Up Your Business (And Your Creative Idea)

In doing research for this book we heard so many things said about how one should run, finance and grow a business. Indeed we noticed that time and time again certain taken-for-granted phrases or axioms were passed out as sound advice. What worried us is that there seemed to be a widespread acceptance of these axioms – even though in many cases they simply do not apply and in some cases may prove counter-productive.

We have structured this book around ten of these axioms. There is a degree of truth in many of the axioms you will meet below. However, blindly follow all of these ten and you have ten ways of potentially messing up your business. Our point then is not to hand out a ten-point checklist. Rather our intention is to question each of these pieces of ‘common knowledge’ and present some alternatives and lessons from the entrepreneurs and managers we talked to.

The ten sections of this book also touch upon a series of issues that academic research on entrepreneurship commonly points to as key areas where firms stumble and make mistakes. Included in each section you will find short case studies based on our interviews with entrepreneurs or managers.

In the following chapters we assume you do not need help with the creative side of the business. However, without paying attention to the business side it may not matter how creative your idea, fashion, film, design or music is.

So we concentrate on the business side, that is, how to start, run and grow a company. A few of these issues are general for all businesses, whereas others are more specific to the creative industries (such as how to deal with Intellectual Property Rights).

Throughout the following we emphasize certain key issues:

• The importance of financing to your business
• The importance of planning
• The importance of business systems
• The importance of learning from your mistakes (and sometimes your successes)