Episode #11 - 8 Common Business Mistakes

Hello and welcome to the Sequoia Project podcast. We are going to talk about something a different, something a little bit more — we're talking about 10 mistakes to avoid making because we have made them. And like Coby said, we made them more than once because we had to figure all this shit out for ourselves for the most part.

Dale: The first thing is, is if you were going to start your business, don't kill too much time on branding, logos, getting the perfect website. The amount of time that I had personally spent, was like, logo has to be perfect. No one actually cares. And there's a really, really good point here. It needs to look good. Sure. Don't just hand someone a stick figure with a thumbs up. But it only needs to look good. Put some time into it. You gotta put effort into things you do. You want it to look nice and be proud of it. But it just needs to be good. It doesn't have to be perfect.

Coby: Not actually knowing what you're selling. I think that's a big mistake that so many people have. They kind of have this idea of what they're selling, but when they're actually going to people and trying to, like getting asked about it and doing the cold calling and everything like that — if you don't actually have your offer, everything like that behind you and properly know what you're selling — I feel like that becomes more of a downfall than anything else.

Dale: Not knowing what you're selling — also the other side of that is not knowing what your customer is buying. Everyone has a service and everyone has a product, but if your customer is buying something because they want something else, that's really the key of what you need to know. So for example, if you sell lawn care, your customer is buying you coming and cutting the lawn. But what they're actually saying to you is, I don't want to spend my time doing that. So what you want to sell them is convenience. What you want to sell them is low friction. What you want to sell them is their own time back.

Coby: Not reviewing and improving. So after everything, whether it's a phone call, whether it's a job, no matter what it is, not actually reviewing the process that you've gone through and taken and not seeing how you could possibly improve or what's gone wrong or anything about it — if you're not actually taking the time to review on literally anything you've done when it comes to business, I think that's such a big mistake.

Coby: Spending money when you don't need to. If you don't need to spend money on something, don't. And then the whole thing of if it's not going to make you money, if you're not making money on the buy, then like, it's not worth spending money.

Coby: Scaling too big too fast. Putting on employees, all that sort of stuff, when you don't have the team for it. We recently tested a version of that in my business. In theory, it was a great idea. Wouldn't have known unless we didn't test it. But it was an attempt to go too big too fast without the necessary knowledge and everything behind it.