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5 Myths About Building Your Business

There are plenty of myths about starting and building a business around. You may have heard that you need to be wealthy and that you can't do it while also working at a regular job, or someone might tell you that you can only be successful if you take huge risks. The problem with believing these myths is that they can lead to making catastrophic errors or perhaps never even trying to start your own business at all. Below are five commonly held myths about running your own company and why they're wrong.

You Have to Do Everything

While it's true that as the business owner you ultimately bear the final responsibility for what happens at your company, it's a mistake to think you must do everything. First, it's not a good use of your time. There are tasks you can outsource to others, freeing you up to work on more important things. Second, you may not even have the expertise to carry out the task. The consequences of preparing a legal document incorrectly, making tax errors, or failing to adequately attend to cybersecurity can all be severe. Know when to delegate or turn to experts.

You Only Have to Focus on the Big Picture

With the above point in mind, you should also not assume that you can be entirely hands off and just focus on the parts of the business that you're most passionate about. In fact, you'll sometimes need to educate yourself about certain aspects that aren't necessarily in your wheelhouse, especially when it comes to saving money. If you run a trucking company, you need to diligently track all your fleet-related expenses and find ways to reduce them.

You might need to research utilizing a fuel card for truckers to learn about how they can help you get fuel discounts, control spending, track purchases, and streamline IFTA reporting. You can also read about how to determine which fuel card option is the best for your fleet. You can certainly get assistance from staff or outside consultants when trying to find the most cost-effective solutions, but ultimately, it's a good idea to be involved in these decisions, at least in the early days of running your company.

You Just Need a Great Idea

It would be wonderful to think that all you need is the best product or service, and you'll succeed. Unfortunately, you can probably think of at least one product or service that you as a consumer thought was exceptional that's no longer available. More goes into becoming successful than just having a superior product or service to offer, including marketing and being able to reach the right customer base. You need to outperform your competitors on several different metrics, not just quality. A corollary to this is believing that you need an original idea to succeed. Often, you simply need to improve on something that already exists.

Be Aggressive with Growth

Even if you are simply starting a side hustle, timidity is not going to lead to great success, but there is some value in humility when it comes to recognizing that slow and steady growth is usually better than pushing too far too fast. Your quality may suffer if you don't have the right resources in place to meet the demand you create. Another potential pitfall is that the demand might not be at the volume that you anticipate. In addition, you need to watch out for losing what it is that your customers like about your product in your effort to expand to a wider market.

Choose the Perfect Time

This is a particularly paralyzing myth because there is no such thing as the perfect time. In fact, successful businesses have been started against the backdrop of all kinds of unfavorable economic or personal situations. That's not to say that you shouldn't try to be strategic about when you launch and some times really are better than others, but this can also become a crutch in which the time is never quite right, and you never take the important first steps.

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