A Good Business Owner Doesn't Make These Mistakes
Common pitfalls you need to avoid because they'll cost you.
To break unhealthy patterns of thinking and acting, business owners need to pay special attention to how they communicate, collaborate, and get work done.
All business owners make mistakes. You'd be abnormal if you did not.
However, some mistakes are avoidable, costly to the business, and hinder business development and growth.
Most business owners (solopreneurs included) are so busy playing catch-up—handling unexpected issues, filling calendars with meetings, and pacifying unhappy clients—that they ignore harmful practices that harm their performance.
These repeated mistakes can become habits—they start creeping into everything they say and do. However, unconscious habits like these are hard to detect and even more challenging to break. Once your brain learns how things must be done, it runs on autopilot and makes most of the decisions for you.
To break unhealthy patterns of thinking and acting, business owners need to pay special attention to how they communicate, collaborate, and get work done.
What are the 5 costly mistakes business owners make?
In particular, they must pay attention to these five mistakes that other good business owners don’t make:
1. Delegate and forget
Learning to delegate or outsource well is the most crucial part of a business owner’s job, but doing it right is a big struggle.
When business owners outsource work and leave outsourcee struggling to figure out everything independently, lack of support at crucial moments leads to frustration, confusion, and helplessness and can even be demotivating.
Good business owners understand this very well — empowerment is not boundaryless freedom.
The big challenge here is knowing how much to be involved. If you are involved too much, you run the risk of micromanagement.
If you are involved too little, you can miss those critical moments where your support or advice could have made a difference. The magic is in the balance.
To avoid making this mistake:
Set upfront expectations on the intermediate milestones.
Align on the frequency of updates. Discuss how and when you can touch base to keep things moving.
Spend time on onboarding, showing those you delegate to what to do.
Key takeaway: Don’t be the business owner who delegates and forgets. Be around to guide, support, and be their force to help them stay resilient when faced with setbacks and challenges.
2. Bottleneck decision-making
I always suggest to lead with context, not control.
Eventually, all businesses scale and you'll be hiring employees. It took me a year in my first business to hire my first employee. The next two years to hire the following three.
It took me a while to learn that they work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They made better decisions without needing input from me.
Business owners who don’t trust their employees to make their own decisions get involved in every decision — they think it’s part of their job (just like I did).
Getting involved in every small detail, in every small problem, is no joke. It takes a lot of energy and often leads to decision fatigue, exhaustion, and burnout.
There’s another problem. Exhaustion from attending to surface-level problems leaves less mental space to think about complex issues. More time spent on small decisions leaves less time for crucial decisions — which is critical for business growth.
Reliant on their boss to do all the thinking for them, employees fail to think for themselves. Dependent on their boss for every small decision and every small action stagnates their growth — it slows them down, prevents them from developing critical thinking skills, and leaves them feeling uninspired and unmotivated.
Key takeaway: Good business owners don’t make this mistake. They build their employees’ confidence by enabling them to make their own decisions, thereby putting their knowledge and experience into practice.
Being empowered to make their own decisions also increases their motivation to do better because they feel accountable for their choices.
To avoid this mistake:
Shift from control to context.
Give clarity to your staff on the decisions they can make independently from the ones that require your attention.
Provide decision frameworks to empower your employee's decision making skills.
Key Takeaway: Don’t be the business owner who thinks that your employees will screw up if you aren’t involved in the decision-making process.
3. Dictate Solutions
It's crazy how we employ people and them how to do things.
Didn't you employ them because of their expertise?
Many business owners give their employees the right opportunities but refuse to give them the autonomy that goes with it. They want things done and want them done their way, which frustrates their staff.
Good business owners don’t make this mistake.
They empower their employees to find their own solutions by focusing on the results without laying down the specific steps needed to achieve them.
How you can avoid this:
Show them the destination, but let them steer their ship.
Share the “what” — the specific outcome that needs to be achieved.
Support it with “why” — how it fits into the big picture and define what success looks like; what looks like a job well done. Knowing the “Why” of doing something is both motivating and inspiring. It opens the door to creativity and innovation.
Don’t let your ego or desire for perfectionism obstruct others from getting work done. Accept different approaches.
Let your employees know that some failure is acceptable, but that doesn’t permit them to be careless or lazy. Talk to them about what’s acceptable and what’s not. You can keep the bar high while leaving room for learning and growth.
Key takeaway: Don’t be the business owner who doesn’t let their employees determine their own solutions. You aren’t being helpful; you’re simply being annoying.
4. Fail to look beyond results
Many business owners turn a blind eye to bad employees, especially if these people are high performers who have an uncanny ability to produce outstanding work.
Tolerating their toxic behavior—getting agitated when others make mistakes, expecting them to work at their pace, passing sarcastic remarks, challenging their intelligence, belittling their skills, or demeaning them when things don’t work out the way they expected—conveys the message that such behavior is acceptable and anybody can get away with it.
As a business owner, do not passively enable these behaviors by failing to notice them and staying ignorant of their effect on your staff. Whatever you do do not actively contribute to it by delaying action—waiting for more proof, ignoring the conflict, or worrying about losing them.
Focusing too much on results can also make you ignore poor performers in your staff with the attitude that they don’t deserve your attention. But doing nothing about their poor performance is not harmless — it impacts staff morale as others feel dragged down to make up for their slack and find lack of accountability as a sign that their boss doesn’t care about fairness or fostering excellence.
Good business owners don’t make this mistake. They know the overall damage to the staff by tolerating bad behavior or poor performance, which is costly.
To avoid this mistake:
Don’t delay difficult conversations — especially when it involves toxic behavior or poor performance. It will only get worse and won’t disappear on its own.
Be careful about the words you choose. Emotionally charged words can trigger negative emotions and put them on the defensive.
Share your observations, discuss the impact, and invite them to devise a solution.
Leave the feedback with clear expectations on the desired changes, timeline, and repercussions of not taking the feedback seriously.
Key takeaway: Don’t be the business owner who only cares about results. You can build an excellent team without compromising on your employee’s well-being.
5. Be overly protective
Work environments can be brutal, especially when people lack respect for others’ time and productivity. Too many meetings, conflicting requests, and information overload can damage a employee’s productivity. Without an opportunity to focus for long durations without interruptions, employees can’t produce quality work.
Interruptions are destructive to productivity. The more a business owner can absorb trivial and unnecessary disruption, the better work their staff can produce.
It’s natural for good business owners in such environments to act as shields for their people—protecting them from being overwhelmed by requests, blocking information that doesn’t concern them, and keeping them away from anything that might distract them from doing their work.
However, what starts as healthy protection can often turn into toxic behavior that destroys company growth. Business owners who don’t know where to draw the line tend to go overboard. By not knowing how to separate healthy interactions from unhealthy ones:
They block their employees from getting the necessary exposure.
Their staff may acquire technical excellence but need to learn other valuable skills like effective communication, conflict resolution, or delegation.
They create strict boundaries with a boss vs employees attitude by treating their own goals as primary and everything else as secondary. This breaks down the collaboration necessary to achieve common goals.
Good business owners don’t make this mistake. Instead of trying to over-protect their staff from unnecessary distractions and interruptions, they coach them to manage their time well.
To avoid this mistake:
Explain the benefits of healthy collaboration and show what it looks like.
Empower them to say no to requests that do not align with their goals.
Encourage them to go beyond staff boundaries to learn about other aspects of the business.
Tell them to make decisions aligned with the more significant interest of the organization and not just their teams.
Key takeaway: Don’t be the business owner who acts as a gatekeeper — spending more and more time shielding people while spending less on doing work that will move your team forward.
Final thoughts
Recognizing and addressing these common pitfalls is crucial for any business owner striving for long-term success.
While it's natural to make mistakes, particularly when juggling numerous responsibilities, conscious effort can mitigate their impact. As you move forward, focus on enhancing communication, collaboration, and strategic planning.
Besides, doing so not only prevents detrimental habits from taking root but also propels your business toward sustainable growth and innovation.
Remember, the most successful entrepreneurs are those who learn continuously and adapt swiftly.
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