2 reasons why entrepreneurs fail in their early stage

There’re several reasons why entrepreneurs fail in their early stages of building their business. Failure could be caused by; lack of funds, no paying customers, fierce competition, team conflict, etc.

Research says approximately 50% of businesses don’t survive within the first 5 years of existence —but why?

Why do some fail and others succeed ceteris paribus (all things being equal)?

Aside from natural disasters that may be a reason why entrepreneurs fail —no one could have prevented that if not forewarned. Nevertheless, natural disasters account for a small percent of the reasons why entrepreneurs fail in their early stage.

Importantly, there are so many successful entrepreneurs to learn from, in fact, some of them have done the honour to share their failures as well as their successes. Some have shared the reasons for their failures and how best to avoid those pitfalls that lead to such failure.

Christian entrepreneurs should learn from these stories to reduce the narrative of the high number of business failures in the early stage.

I know every entrepreneur situation is not exactly identical to another but overall many entrepreneurs go through similar experiences from the beginning.

What failure really mean?

To clarify what failure means here —is an entrepreneur who gave up their pursuit of entrepreneurship due to failures in business. Many entrepreneurs will experience a lot of failures before they succeed but the ones who stopped their journey mid-way are the ones who failed in business.

Entrepreneurs who failed are those who didn’t pick up from their failures and didn’t see it as a challenge to try something different —to adjust strategy or pivot.

There are 2 things every entrepreneur must have to minimize the chances of failure. You shall succeed as a Christian entrepreneur with these 2 in addition to your faith in the Almighty God who said;

“be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”

Genesis 1:28

So here are the 2 main factors for success as an  entrepreneur

• Passion 
• Focus

Passion 

9 out of every 10 successful entrepreneurs believe passion is their number one factor for success. Honestly, they’re absolutely right.

Passion is crucial in undertaking any long term endeavour except if it’s a short term gig you do for survival. However, when you’re trying to build a business empire, you need passion to pull you through.

Passion is the summation of love + talent + persistence. Therefore, anything you love doing with your talent and persistent is your passion.

Tough times in business will surely come, what keeps you hanging on is your passion for it. So you need to be an entrepreneur because of your passion for your business.

You hear people say ‘turn your passion into a business’, that’s right, but it can’t be the other way around because you can’t turn your business into your passion.

Importantly, passion is a natural thing you’re born with —you can’t acquire or purchase. But you can search for what you’re passionate about. It’s already inside you waiting to be discovered.

Similarly, talents are gifts given to us by God as He deems fit. As seen in the parable of talents in Matthew;

“To one he gave five talents, to another, two, and to another, one, each according to his own ability”

Matthew 24:15

Nevertheless, passion is always geared towards your talents. Therefore, you can discover your talents when you’re trying different things and you noticed the ones you’re very good at.

The things you’re most drawn to and naturally good at doing is most likely your passion.

Passion vs Talent vs Persistent

There is a thin line for confusion between what you like and what you have a talent for. For example, someone who likes to listen to music a lot, but have no talent in music; singing, writing songs, playing instruments, production, distribution and other talents needed in the music industry.

That person shouldn’t use their likeness in music to pursue a music business because likeness doesn’t equate passion.

Some entrepreneurs go into a certain type of business because of what they like or admire not because of their passion. Initially, they may confuse their likeness for passion, but when it gets tougher they realize they weren’t as passionate as they thought.

Such likeness can be equated to ‘worldly love’ as discussed in this article, it fades away when the storm comes but your passion remains because it doesn’t waver. Passion equals ‘true love‘.

When you’re passionate about something you’re persistent about it. Persistence must go along with passion.

How could you explain Edison’s 1000 trials of making the light bulb? If his passion wasn’t fueled with talent and persistence, he would have given up in the 99th trial. Talent is not enough without persistence.

Minus talent and persistence is incomplete passion. But passion is true love

As an entrepreneur, never jump into a particular business because it’s trendy. Business gets tough without passion for what you do —it’s hard.

The lack of passion is one of the major reasons entrepreneurs fail to continue their journey.

Focus

Unarguably, passion is the first ingredient for cooking success for most entrepreneurs. However, no matter how passionate you’re about anything, if you lack focus you’re doom to fail.

Focus brings passion under control.

For example, you may have a passion for music and your talent lies in playing different musical instruments; piano, guitar, drums, saxophone, flute, violin, harp, trumpet, clarinet, etc.

However, if you want to be an expert in playing musical instruments you have to focus on mastering one instrument at a time before proceeding to another.

Without focus, you ‘ll burnout quickly before reaching your goal

You may come across some entrepreneurs who were very passionate about their business but dropped out along the way. One of the likely reasons is burnout, they didn’t know how to focus on one thing.

When you’re passionate about something, it very easy to get caught up in trying different things around your passion. You ‘re so excited about doing all of them and forgets ‘time‘ is finite.

Life has given us one of the most precious resources called ‘Time’ but it’s the most limited.

You don’t have time to bounce around many things at the same time. It doesn’t matter how passionate you’re about playing all instrument —If you can’t pick one at a time to focus, all odds are against your success.

In summary, passion with no focus leads to burnout, while focus with no passion leads to dropout (give up early). Therefore, the ideal for success is passion plus focus.

Takeaway: With passion and focus, the odds for failure are minimized. These 2 along with the grace of God who is ever faithful to all Christian entrepreneurs who trust in Him, then you’ve 100% assurance of success.