Top 5 errors keep making smart business people

There is a ridiculous thing about the experience: this doesn’t always make you safe from failure. In fact, some highly experienced, intelligent founders I met – including myself – have run more than once in the same fire, it will be different at this time.

After buying, building, burning and selling businesses of more than $ 1 million to $ 1 million in repeated revenue annual revenue, teams are less than five and 500 larger, I have seen these mistakes close. Not once and twice. But more and more I have made them myself. I have seen that we make old people. And with great frustration, I have made them surprisingly smart businessmen, fully aware of the warning signs.

Why does it happen?

Because we please ourselves that this time is different. We raised more capital. We are in a new vertical. The economy has changed. We have a good adviser. But these so -called differences rarely change the basic principles. These mistakes do not care about your funding round, your pitch deck or the decades. They always look for a way to show … unless you deliberately learn to recognize them and avoid them.

Here are the top five mistakes of smart businessmen.

Related: 5 ordinary business errors have no excuse to repeat

1. Out -killing to simplicity

Smart founders love strategy. We like architecture, system and layers. But often, this intelligence leads us to out of something that should have been easier.

In one of our first project, we have created an on -boarding system so “intelligent” that it requires five steps identification, AI scoring and three user roles. It was technically perfect – and completely unusable. No user created it through the first interaction without the need for help. We engineered a fort when all the customers had the front door.

Simple is not synonymous. Easy extension. Used easy. If your product, process or pitch cannot be explained in one sentence, you are not affecting people – you are confusing them. Do not mistake the complexity of confusion with value. Often, this is the opposite.

2. Over -building before testing

It looks great to build. It feels like progress. This is the measurement. It’s interesting. But construction without a real customer’s verification is equivalent to sailing without testing the tide: you are probably moving fast, but you are heading towards the sand bar.

I once spent months and hundreds of thousands of dollars that make a tool. We were sure the market wanted. We made features on the upper part of the features, tied to AI’s recommendations, made dashboards, made reports, name it. But we did not experience the basic value with real consumers. When we finally launched, the silence was deaf.

We did not fail because we could not build. We failed because we did not hear.

Your MVP should hurt a little. It should feel incomplete. Because when you advance the user’s opinion point, you are building for yourself – not your user. Build to learn. Then build on a scale.

3. To ignore customer feedback that hurts

Let’s be honest: Some opinions cut deep. Especially when you are excited. When you have put years in a business or a product, it is worth hearing whether it is confused, nasty or not.

On one occasion, by scaling a company of our own, we were receiving permanent complaints about our service time. We cleaned it. “Growing pain,” we said. “We’re spreading.” But there are complaints, and we continue to give rational status – unless the loss is now well. The clients began to leave. Our reputation has achieved a success. And solving the problem will cost ten times what will happen if we work first.

The opinions, especially the kind of the kind that makes you rotate, is gold. Do not taste it. Do not argue with it. Use it. Because every complaint you neglect becomes someone else’s competitive advantage.

Related: 5 common errors make leaders and how to fix them

4. To misuse your burn rate

This is one of the deadliest mistakes. And ironically, it is more common among the founders who have picked up the capital or have already gone out. You think you’ve got room. You think you are getting strategic by “investing in growth”. And suddenly, your company’s financial discipline went out of the window.

I carried out strict operations. I have also conducted operations with fat budgets and a lot of confidence. Tight people were under pressure, but lean and sharp. More and more funds flourished – additional fares, experimental campaigns, unnecessary shopkeepers. All in the name of development. But the point here is: If you do not survive for the Enough to reach it for too long, development does not matter.

Every dollar should work. If you can’t justify it with a near -term utility or long -term leverage, you will probably be burning money. You wish you will have six months from now.

Being a smart business does not mean neglecting your burn rate. This means to be obsessed with it. Because financial waste is not merely ineffective – it is existence.

5. Having more and more people to solve the problem

This is a nearby ritual. Things begin to break – operations, marketing, delivery – and the focus is: “We need more people.”

The founders tell themselves that scaling the team will fix it. VCS sometimes pushes the head coal growth as a speed indicator. But nine times out of ten, this is a wrong move.

I have scored teams from five to 200+. I have seen departments like Lego Blocks stecking up, trying to fix broken pipelines, an unclear character or system that never worked before. Result? More meetings, more chaos, more burning. Not much progress.

Throwing people into a broken system makes you even more breaks.

What I have learned is that most of the problems can be solved with clear and sovereignty by some eligible people, not by hiring the battalion. The talent density beats the volume each time. If your house is on fire, you do not fix it by moving more to tenants. You removed the fire.

Related: 10 stupid mistakes smart people make

Intelligence is not insurance

It is easy to understand that once you have created or sold a company, you have “earned” your wisdom seeds. But the real test is not whether you have experienced these mistakes before – that is, whether you keep making them.

Experience without reflection is just repetitive.

I have created companies with world -class teams. I have also seen great ideas burning because I refused to listen to the basics. These five errors appear repeatedly, usually wrapped in new branding, new market conditions or new funding. But they are the same samples, and they still hit the speed.

So your call for your action is: Audit yourself.

Where are you working more than? Where are you building without feedback? Where are you hiring instead of solving? Where are you ignoring warning symptoms because they are painful?

The smart action you can take is not being cautious – this is clear. Because explanation increases endurance. And tolerance is the one that separates companies that survive from living companies.