5 Mistakes Business Owners Make and How to Prevent Them
While starting a business is difficult, growing it into a success is even harder. Naturally, business mistakes are bound to be made along the way. While this should be expected, making the same mistakes over and over can lead to failure. In almost any business, there are common mistakes made by many owners. To stay competitive, it’s important to know what these business owners mistakes are, and how they can be remedied.
1. Choosing an Expensive Credit Card Processor
Since most businesses accept credit cards as a form of payment, they need a credit card processor that charges a reasonable amount. Many business owners mistakenly go with the first processor they find, rather than take some time and compare the various plans. Rather than doing business with a processor that charges high markups and has lots of hidden costs, using Payment Depot is a much smarter choice. With bargain priced monthly membership fees and transaction fees as low as 10 cents each, Payment Depot makes good financial sense.
2. Too Short On Cash
Business owners sometimes get so excited about starting their new venture that they pay little attention to their long-term cash flow. If business gets slow and there’s not enough cash to keep things going, the result is often a going-out-of-business sale. Ideally, all business owners should have enough cash on hand to survive for six months, letting them navigate the peaks and valleys of any market economy. If you can last even longer than that on company savings, even better.
3. Thinking Small, Not Big
Many businesses stay small because they never take chances. By going after clients who traditionally deal with larger competitors, smaller businesses can find themselves growing very quickly. Many business owners fail to realize that all businesses, even the biggest corporations, were small at one time. Setting short and long-term goals can help a business get where they always dreamed one step at a time. Don’t be afraid to expand if the numbers add up right!
4. Lack of Market Research
Some ideas always sound good when looked at on paper or discussed with others, but it’s still critical to conduct some market research before proceeding full steam ahead. Getting out into the community and talking with people can be a good start, but sometimes it’s best to hire the services of a professional market research company to examine demographics and other statistics vital to your business’ success. Successful business owners understand this and use it to their advantage, while others simply take chances and often fail because they didn’t do their homework.
5. Trying To Do Everything Yourself
Perhaps the biggest mistake made by business owners is trying to do too much of the day-to-day work themselves. When this happens, service often suffers. A smart small business owner is one who recognizes this and hires employees to handle customer service duties, and sometimes contract with outside payroll services to handle bookkeeping and other day-to-day financial aspects of the business. This will free you up to do more “big picture” work in managing your company and planning for the future.
By working smarter as well as harder than your competitors, you can avoid these common business mistakes many owners make along the way. Choosing an economical credit card processor such as Payment Depot, as well as doing your research and letting others contribute to the workload, should result in a successful business for many years.
Serious Business Fails Owners Make With Their Credit Card Processor
For many small businesses, the matter of which credit card processor to choose is hardly the biggest day-to-day priority attracting their attention. And yet, what might seem to be a minor decision can end up costing businesses a great deal in the long run. Choosing a credit card processor is something that is best done after a careful price analysis, not as the result of a split-second decision. Indeed, a hasty choice of processing company can actually put a business owner in something of a tough spot. But why is it so important to select the right merchant services processor the first time?
Poor Plan Selection
Most credit card processing companies offer a range of plans that vary by price and services provided. A major difficulty for company owners can be figuring out which plan they should choose to suit their business. For instance, small business owners might select a plan that assumes a high number of monthly transactions and a considerable monthly fee that is better suited to a nationwide chain able to cover the sizable processing costs. Likewise, a rapidly growing business might be too conservative in their estimate of what kind of service they need – perhaps underestimating the amount of monthly transactions they will have – and find themselves either stuck with an insufficient plan or slapped with unnecessary fees.
No Attention to Detail
Many small business owners, given the sometimes up-and-down volatility of their livelihood, have trained themselves to be rapid decision makers. However, choosing a credit card processing company is not the time to breeze past the fine print. For instance, the service may have hidden fees based on the number of transactions per month, leading to unexpected expenses. Many processing companies will also charge a fee that is a percentage of each transaction – which can be ruinous over the long term. Obviously, such exorbitant fees and charges can be quite burdensome for many companies, and failure to read the details of an agreement can mean being stuck forking over a high percentage of revenue to credit card processing fees.
Choosing the Wrong Provider
In the effort to choose a provider quickly and keep business moving, businesses can go with whatever name they have heard in the past as opposed to shopping around. However, taking the extra time to select the provider that works best for each business is absolutely essential for finding a good fit. For instance, Payment Depot offers plans that address many of the shortcomings listed in the paragraphs above. Payment Depot charges only a yearly fee and a flat rate per transaction (as low as 10 cents each), so there are no fees based off of the percentage of each transaction to worry about. Additionally, if a growing business finds that its current plan is no longer ideal, Payment Depot allows businesses to quickly and easily change to a plan that better serves them. If they ever decide to leave Payment Depot, there are also no cancellation fees – and in fact, no hidden fees at all. So, consider Payment Depot to avoid the easily made – but very costly – common mistakes listed above.
Small Business Owner Saved $446.52 A Month On Credit
There’s no better way to show business owners how much money Payment Depot can save them than with a real life example. With that in mind, we’re proud to present a new testimonial from Craig Donaldson of Image Imports in Tustin, CA. Craig co-founded Image Imports with his best friend Martin Arriola 29 years ago, and has built it into a thriving business working on some of Southern California’s finest European cars ever since.
When Craig made the switch to Payment Depot, his monthly credit card processing cost went from $1054.05 to just $607.53, despite processing 50% more. He saved $446.52 in his first month. Craig summed it up better than we ever could: “Even though I was skeptical to switch to Payment Depot, as a small business, I needed to save money somehow, so I gave it a shot. It sounded like it was too good to be true, but now that I’ve seen my statements, it’s true!”
To learn more about Craig’s story, visit our Testimonials page. If you’re a business owner and would like to know how we can help you save money just like he did, please give us a call at 1-888-815-9147 today!
To get the best credit card processing rates, don’t pay a rate at all to your card processor! Switch to Payment Depot and get a Direct Visa & Mastercard Rate with no added percentage. We simply add 25¢ instead of a percentage of your sales. This saves you thousands of dollars a year.
Stop shopping for lower credit card processing rates, start paying 0% to your processor today. Payment Depot is the new way to process credit cards.
The Payment Depot membership pricing plan, and lack of nuisance fees, will help small businesses save money on their transactions. Payment Depot also offers superior customer service to customers in many industries. For more details, contact our award-winning customer service team today.