1. Renting an office while the project is underway for an online-only business: For an online-only business where people come to your website for services to be rendered for them, you do not need a physical office for a start, what you need is somewhere safe that you can develop the project alongside other members of the team, and if you do not develop web applications, all you need is contract the project for some people who will work on it for some period of time and deliver it to you, Mark Zuckeberg only rented apartment after he had launched Facebook and lots of people had signed up.
2. Telling people too early about the project while the project is still under construction (when the project is still being developed): Any blunder of a CEO is advertising the projects they have while the projects is underway, except the idea is unique and registered with ministry of commerce, anyone could take up the idea as soon as possible, fine-tune the idea and bring it out in a better way that a lot of people might never imagine. You do not want to be another Winklevoss to a brilliant and fast Mark Zuckerberg.
3. Advertising too early while the project is underway: This is different from the 2 above in that a lot of CEOs go about advertising what is not in existence, the project that is being developed, maybe for the purpose of enticing investors, but this is an error in the sense that, the investors will like to see not only brilliant ideas but also working ideas. Some sensitive and brilliant people have the ability to hijack other people’s ideas too.
4. Recruiting wrong employees into wrong positions: In recent times, a lot of CEOs do not seek the advice of people in business, the experts before recruiting into positions in their businesses. I have seen a CEO whose idea is online services but employed accountants, Customer Relation Officers, Chief Operation Officer even when there are no enough programmers, designers, system analysts in his ICT department, whereas, the success of the ICT department will warrant the services of accountants, CRO, COO. What customer does a Customer Relation Officer want to relate with if there is no products or services to sell to them.
5. Recruiting a lot more employees than they require: As an entrepreneur, you cannot afford to waste your money on employees who come to their place of work to play computer games, who just come to chat to his/her friends on Facebook. Make sure you employ only the workers needed to do the work in your office.
6. Failure to follow their business plan accordingly: A business plan includes work plan, strategies, tactics, milestones etc., written for the purpose of the business, to be followed by the entrepreneur in order to attain success. Most entrepreneurs have very brilliant, viable and achievable business plans but they neglect their business plans once they start the operation of their business, this is a disaster.
7. Failure to meet up with deadlines and periodic reports: Failure to pay attention to deadlines and periodic reports to the superiors by the inferiors is a disaster for any organization. The more an organization fails to meet deadlines the closer the organization to closing down.
8. Lack of any rudimentary knowledge about the development of their products and/or services: So many entrepreneurs have brilliant ideas, especially during this information age of ours, but they are being cheated because of their rudimentary knowledge about information technology. An entrepreneur who wants to go into an online business should have a basic knowledge about ICT, he/she might not be a pro, but the ability to know basic things in computing realm is a plus for any CEO. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs are devoid of these skills, thus make them to be at the mercies of the professionals in the business and their ideas might even be stolen.
9. Being too greedy to take the glory: As an entrepreneur ability to be conscious of love of money is very important, if you know that you stand the chance of losing your idea to a professional in a field, why can’t you just go into agreement with the person in question, sell some part of the company to him/her, let him feel he owns the company too, most employee would work best if they are allowed to own some percentages of the company, especially for a rising small company, after all, nobody wants to see his/her company closing down. Some CEOs are so greedy that they always want to use employees and dump them, they think about their profit alone while thinking about the people that will make their dreams come through.
10. Marginalizing some employees in the organization: Some CEOs are not professional, they make their employees’ place of work hell for them, they do not make some of their employees to feel at home, they find it difficult to make their workers happy, even if you have something against your workers, the best thing to do is to pretend as if everything is alright and make him happy working for you, do not let him feel marginalized, because obviously, nobody wants to work where he/she’s not welcomed, so you might lose the best brains you have in your company because of your sentiments and trust me, getting a better replacement is not as easy as replacing a David Beckham with a Cristiano Ronaldo in Manchester United by Sir Alex Ferguson.
11. Failure to make employees work as a team: Team playing is the key to success if any organization wants to succeed in what they do. A lot of CEOs cause rancor among their members of staff. Once the spirit of teamwork leaves a company, that is just the beginning of the end of that company. The disadvantage of this is that, an employee working on a piece of work might be duplicated by another employee, who out of ignorance is doing the same piece of work with another co-worker; this brings about repetition and consequently failure to meet deadlines. So, for you not to witness the closing down of your enterprise, the best thing is to encourage and insist on teamwork.
12. Insisting on the fact that he/she should be reported to directly by all employees: Some CEOs are out of ideas, they insist on the fact that all employees of the company should be responsible to them directly without delegating authority to some superior workers, this is strange, but it does happen, they feel they know it all, or that they are smart enough to oversee everything all their workers do and in their opinions they want to expedite the rate at which any workers of their company work and instill meeting deadline spirit into their workers’ body, but this is wrong, no matter how small a company is, it is always good to delegate authority to the experts in a particular department of the company. I cannot imagine how a CEO is just an accountant, who knows little or nothing about ICT and wants to inspect workers in the ICT department.
13. Having affairs with any of the employees of the company: This is common among lots of CEOs, having a sexual affair with any members of staff in your company is the beginning of your doom. This is extremely unprofessional behavior. You cannot tell someone you are having an affair with to meet deadlines; such people will definitely mix pleasure with business for you. You would definitely find it difficult to control such people, just because of the intimacy between you.
14. Failure to sign Non-disclosure Agreement and Non-Compete agreement with an employee: A lot of entrepreneurs make these mistakes, a company that deal with clients information is supposed to sign agreement with the employees in charge of such information not to disclose to anyone the information about their clients, also, after leaving the company, there should be a particular period of time he cannot compete with the company, these will make the worker not to divulge their secrets to their direct competitors. A failure to do this can close down a company.
15. Paying too low for the employees who are the brains behind the development or manufacturing of the products and/or services: Everyone wants to reap the fruits of his/her labor, the people who are doing the main work in the development of a product/service are supposed to be paid higher because without a good development or manufacturing from them, there is nothing others who are in other departments like marketing would market, and there is customers, the Customers Relations department will relate to. For an employer to employ cheap services in such a sensitive department might wreck the company. For instance, in a company that produces software as a service, people in the ICT department are supposed to be treated better, because that is the origin of what brings foods into other departments’ table.
16. Paying too high for the employees whose job description depends on the developing or manufacturing products/services: Paying too high for people in Marketing department of a company whose sales depend on the development or manufacturing of products/services from other department is just an invitation to disaster by such organization. Marketing department is a key to any organization no doubt, but if the people in the manufacturing or development department do their jobs well, selling a very good products of services is not a problem, once a client or customer benefits immensely, he would not only come back for such goods or services, he would refer and invite others.
17. Failure to train employees of the company: On the average, workers in any organizations are supposed to be trained at least twice in every year so that they can be able to move with the trend of development in the industry, if not, the company would be running on old styles and archaic ideas. This brings a company down so early.
18. Failure to pay employees’ salaries: Some employers are found of owing their workers, they are found of paying aerials instead of advanced, someone who does brain jobs and fail to go home at the end of a month will not be happy with his/her job, he would not be able to think and provide the best for the company he works for, he would only be thinking on how to survive. There is nothing so disastrous as this kind of situation for a company, once an employee’s salary is being delayed, the employee loses focus and puts little or no effort towards the development of the company.
19. Failure to coordinate the employees: As a CEO of a company, the job is to coordinate each and every member of company, oversee their affairs, encourage them, and see to their welfares and so on. Once any of these is missing, then the company is very close to ‘out of service’
20. Subjecting employees to too many rules: As a CEO, you do not want to treat your workers like slaves, you do not want to give them too many rules, and you should know that the more the security, the less the friendliness and functionality. Be friendly with your workers but be professional, be principled but sometimes be flexible and be diplomatic on some issues.
