Male: Welcome back with the economy’s stumbling in small businesses accounting for 70% of the American economy. Millions of people and dollars are at risk everyday.
Female: So what can be done to help save these businesses? Jim Muehlhausen is a certified public accountant and author of “The 51 Fatal Business Errors and How to avoid them?” Good morning, Jim. Thank you so much for joining us. Everybody needs to know about these things and we don’t want to make fatal business mistakes.
Jim: Well, we certainly don’t. In fact, well I don’t know if we have time to cover the top five business errors but on the list of the top five business errors that people are making these days. The first is focusing on the economy instead of focusing on their business. The primary job of any business owner is to be proactive not reactive and there are awful lots of business owners out there these days kind of rolling out of their hand in the air saying “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Got it.
Everybody’s business is down 20% or more but ideal with what they call SMB – small to medium-sized businesses. Those businesses have affectively an infinitesimal share of the market and a huge opportunity for up-site.
If you’re a ten million dollar ache-back contractor here at Louisville, you may be half percent of the market. Let’s go out there and get ten while your competitors are asleep at the wheel trying to figure out what to do about the economy. Whether you like it or not, 2009 is a function of what you did in 2008, if you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing as a business owner.
What you do today is going to affect 2010 and 2011 which leads me to the second most important error that business owners make which is not working enough on their business model. The single most important function that you can perform as a business owner is to tweet and improve your business model. What’s a business model? A business model is a primary way that you attract, retain and service your customers. A business model unfortunately fails in about ten years for most businesses.
Male: Jim, we don’t have a whole lot of time so if we can knock out three, four and five right here, we’d appreciate it.
Jim: Absolutely! In fact, I may have even go to three, four, and five. The reason that I am here at Louisville, tomorrow morning I will be at the Louisville Slugger Museum giving a speech to business owners. Thanks to Republic Bank for bringing me in. If you’d like tickets to that event, I’d typically get some sponsorship tickets. You can call 87790-FOCUS or you can go to my website 51Errors.com. I’ll also be signing books tomorrow at Borders on Shelby Ville Road at 7 p.m. That’s Borders on Shelby Ville Road.
Male: Alright! There’s the graphic if you need any more information about that again, Tuesday from seven to nine. Thanks Jim! We appreciate you being here. He’s there at Shelby Ville Road location. I’m sure many of you have a lot of questions about starting a small business and here could be your chance with some answers.
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