Five toxic mistakes that kill entrepreneurs’ dreams

In Summary

• The most toxic mistake that entrepreneurs make — the moment they close a big deal and the money is transferred into their account — is to reward themselves instead of rewarding the business.
• An idea should be good enough to sell itself. Killing another idea based on malice to advance yours is the epitome of Neanderthal reasoning.

By Steve Biko
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While in the second year at Law School in the University of Nairobi, I recall watching the film Hidalgo. It helped me nurture my dream of creating a firm that encompassed law, the stock market and digital media.

 

Many thought I was going crazy, that I should focus on just being a good lawyer, but my view of law was simple. It was a foundation one could leverage to push one’s dreams through. It opened up one's mind to being able to understand business and how to navigate the hurdles of contracting, and solving problems.

I faced many challenges, and eight years on, I am still pursuing my dream. Most of my friends from back then are now paying attention. Many still think I am crazy.

Interestingly, the challenges I have faced along the way were not fatal to my dream but made me more creative, more versatile and more adaptive in thought and execution. What has held me back, however, is my failure to harness lessons from the mistakes that I have made along the way.

MOST TOXIC MISTAKE

The most toxic mistake that entrepreneurs make — the moment they close a big deal and the money is transferred into their account — is to reward themselves instead of rewarding the business. We starve the very idea we are meant to be nurturing.

By failing to reinvest in the business, the entrepreneur is simply saying, “I don't believe in myself and it's better to reward myself now by buying a car, or taking a mortgage than pushing my business to the next level.”

The second most toxic mistake that entrepreneurs make is to treat employees like liabilities. These are the people charged with ensuring the entrepreneur’s vision is adapted and scaled to such levels that it becomes self-sustaining. Failure to understand the daily goings-on in their lives, to reward them when they succeed, is a  daily wearing-off mechanism that leads to zombie employees.

Zombie employees come to work without fail to achieve one goal: get paid at the end of the month. They have no motivation, and no desire to do more than the bare minimum. Many entrepreneurs turn good potential employees into zombie ones and their dream fizzles out within six months.

NEANDERTHAL REASONING

The third most toxic mistake we make — in the naive believe that we are doing ourselves a favour — is to try and sabotage other entrepreneurs. The idiotic belief that blowing out another entrepreneur's candle will make yours shine brighter is something we need to correct.

An idea should be good enough to sell itself. Killing another idea based on malice to advance yours is the epitome of Neanderthal reasoning. Entrepreneurship is about creating solutions and making the environment we operate in better. It’s about changing lives, not creating problems at the behest of greed.

The fourth most toxic mistake we make is failing to repay debt. Any keen and ambitious entrepreneur must appreciate the need to repay money borrowed. Repayment creates the needed environment for an entrepreneur's idea to be nurtured by other partners.

The fifth most toxic mistake we make is to dismiss the essence of partnerships. We cling to a small idea all the years, stuck in a rut as multinationals take over the industry. In today's world, creating a new wheel in terms of ideas is almost impossible. Leveraging partnership can help scale ideas on already existing platforms, reduce the cost of operations, bring in better technology and breathe sustainability into a business.