When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.
-Napoleon Hill

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.
- Colin Powell

Failures don’t plan to fail; they fail to plan
 - Harvey MacKay

In ways large and small, success or failure has little to do with your wishes, wants, hopes, dreams, or good intentions. All these are elements are critical, but in the end, it all comes down to what you do, the specific actions you take (or fail to take). In ways large and small, success and failure is really not personal; it’s not about you — it’s about what you do.

For two years I worked for a small business e-commerce web site that ultimately failed. While success is never guaranteed, what surprised me, what I learned, is that if you want to fail, there are well-known, well-tested, proven ways to do that. Conversely, if you want to have the best chance to succeed, again, there are well-known, well-tested, proven ways to do that too. 

The well-known failure rate for small business is grim: 40% fail in 1 year. Of those who survive 1 year, 80% fail in 5 years, and of those who survive 5 years, another 80% fail.

Most small businesses are started by “technicians”, that is people who are skilled at something and who enjoy doing that thing. (A technician can be anything from a computer programmer to plumber to a dog groomer to a musician or lawyer.) When these technicians strike out on their own, they tend to continue doing the work they are skilled at, and ignore the overarching aspects of business. Without clear goals and quantification benchmarks, they soon find themselves overworked, understaffed, and eventually broke.

Sound familiar?

Every small business owner needs to simultaneously be an entrepreneur and a manager as well as a technician. The technician is the worker-bee, the one who produces the product. The manager makes sure operations and finances run smoothly and consistently. The entrepreneur formulates the goals, and steers the business in the direction needed to reach those goals. Of these three personalities, the entrepreneur is key – without the entrepreneur, the technician will work himself or herself to death or bankruptcy. As the business grows, the business owner will need to draw away from the technician work and manager work and delegate this work.

Two ways to guarantee failure:

  1. No attempt to define clear goals and quantification benchmarks (i.e., no or little attempt to really measure and track success or failure).
  2. Even if goals and benchmarks are put into place, there no real management, no real oversight of the business.

What’s the trick for an e-commerce web site to succeed?

First, make sure the above 3 ingredients are fully functional each day, i.e., 1) part of the web site team is operating as a technician, 2) part is operating as management, and 3) the entrepreneur part, someone to set goals and hammer out plans to meet those goals.

Second, for turning a small businesses around, Michael E. Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisted suggest looking at franchises as a model:

In comparison to the dismal rate of ordinary small-business start-ups, 75% of franchises succeed at 5 years. The reason they succeed is that they are set up so that any unskilled person off the street could walk in, buy a franchise, run all operations in the franchise, and have a fairly good chance of success. In order to meet this level of success, franchise companies have clear operations manuals, procedures, consistent sales approaches – every detail of running the business is specified down to dress codes and wall paper.

In short, you need to look at your small business web site as simply a franchise for selling a specific product.

A website designer or an information archetect can not tell you exactly how to look at your specific business from a franchise point of view — for that, read Michael E. Gerber’s book. However, from a technical standpoint, a good website designer recognizes that an e-commerce site is a with well-known, well-developed “solution” to a specific problem. It’s not a mystery about how to build a site – 100s of successful profitable web sites exist, and they all function basically the same  (i.e., think of a website like a ‘car,’ or a ‘house’: there’s lots of variety out there in the world, but underneath, they’re all basically the same — they have to have specific known features, they have to perform specific known actions if they are to function as ‘cars’ and ‘houses.’).

Technical competence in building your site, competent management in running your business, marketing/promotion, and the setting of clear goals and planning: the first three are fairly easy with known solutions and guidelines. As for the last part, the setting of clear goals and planning, this is the hardest part .  Take care of first things first, the important things, and you will succeed:

“Before success comes in any person’s life, they are sure to meet with much temporary defeat, and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a person the easiest and logical thing to do is to quit.That is exactly what the majority of people do.

More than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known told the author their greatest success came just one step BEYOND the point at which defeat had overtaken them.

Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach.”
- Napoleon Hill

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