Why 99% of Businesses Fail | Keys to Success in Entrepreneurship

Why do most businesses fail? Why is business so hard for rookie entrepreneurs? In this episode, Brendan Ecker, serial entrepreneur, author, and investor, discusses why 99% of businesses fail and never turn a profit.

Learn the most essential keys to success in business and entrepreneurship, whether it be in sales, finance, marketing, advertising, networking, lead generation, or leadership. Learn the keys to success for chasing your dreams and chasing "the good life". Learn how to reach health, wealth, love, happiness, and freedom in every aspect of your daily routine in business. Learn to win effortlessly and print money like a bank.

Be sure to subscribe to our channel and like our content for more like this. Share this content with other business owners and entrepreneurs if you got any value from it. Stay prudent, stay powerful, and stay wealthy.

TIMESTAMPS:
[00:00]: Intro
[00:30]: Business is a Vehicle of Wealth | Build an Assembly Line
[00:51]: Build a Team | Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
[03:08]: What is a Business? Think Like the 1%.
[04:10]: The American Spirit and Independence
[05:50]: Consistency, Focus, and 5 Key Elements to Success
[06:30]: Most Give Up | Persist Through The Pain
[07:20]: Sustainable Business = Good Business
[10:42]: Think With the End in Mind | Believing is Seeing
[11:23]: Skill is Everything | Be a Jack of All Trades.
[12:00]: Knowledge is Power | Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses
[13:10]: Why Contracts are Important in Business
[13:53]: Managing Family Life While Growing a Business
[14:59]: Time is Limited | Business Requires Speed
[15:36]: Chase Your Dreams | Make Money While You Sleep

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

reasons that nobody ends up starting a business is because you were never taught to start a business in school. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Brendan Acker Influence, where I teach you how to succeed, accomplish your dreams and develop multiple income streams. Why do most businesses fail? Most businesses fail because business is extremely hard. Everybody wants success, everybody wants money, everybody wants that dream, that mansion in Florida. The reason business is so hard is because you need so many different moving parts in order to make it work. Essentially, with a business, you're creating a vehicle. You're creating this assembly line, you're creating a system of systems that contain more systems and then processes on top of that. Do you have that? If you are a business owner, you need to really ask yourself is a business just a building or is a business a real service? The reason business is so hard is because a business is a vehicle. It's a vehicle of wealth. Essentially, you want to make money. You need to start a business. But here's the catch If you want to start a business, you're going to need to have your team in place. The reason business is so hard is because running a business is like coaching a team. If you want to be a great football coach, for example. You can't have a football team without the team. You needed to have a team in place. In order for you to have a real business, you got to have a team of people running the business. You need to have a team of people that are pushing forward goals and objectives and collecting wins collecting losses sometimes, but overall, long-term wins. Eventually, you're trying to get to that Super Bowl. Now what's the Super Bowl in business? Well, in my opinion, I think in business the Super Bowl would be selling your business for millions of dollars. So maybe you built an AI software company like mine, maybe you built a video editing agency like mine. Whatever the business is, the goal is to make enough money in sales that you can sell the business for, hopefully 10 times more. So if you make a million dollars, you sell a business for 10 times that. So $10 million you sell your business for. That is the American dream. But the reason business is so hard and the reasons that nobody ends up starting a business is because you were never taught to start a business in school, first of all. First of all, the more you read, the more you realize that the American economy was built for the business owner, the more you learn about America and the United States and our country. How we started. We started off as a capitalist country. Today we're more of a communist country. Today we're more of a socialist country. But I think we have a chance to revert back to the old ways, which is where we are a capitalist country where we profit as a nation, as an individual, by our business, by being self-employed, by having our own system of systems. See, that's a business at the end of the day.

Speaker 1: 2:24

So before we can even talk about why businesses fail, you have to talk about what a business really is A vehicle. A business is a vehicle of wealth. A business is a money-making machine. A business is like a bank. You need to think of a business just like that, because essentially that's what it is. A business is a vehicle. In order to make any vehicle run, you need to have an assembly line of people building the vehicle right. You need to build the vehicle up so that way it can drive. So essentially, you need to hire your team. Is what I'm saying. If you're trying to be a coach of a football team, basketball team, baseball team, you can't be a coach of that team If you don't have the team, you don't have a team. If you don't have the team, if you don't got all 11 players on the field in football, you don't have a team, you don't get to play. And that's how it is in business. You got to have all of the moving parts, you have to have all of the players.

Speaker 1: 3:07

Before we can talk about why businesses fail, you need to talk about what a business really is. Business a person's regular occupation, profession or trade, the practice of making one's living by engaging in commerce. That is the definition of business. But to me, business is a much larger term. It's a different definition. At the end of the day, essentially, you can create a different life for yourself. It's the practice of making money. It's the practice of generating freedom financially. It's the practice of leadership.

Speaker 1: 3:33

Look at the most powerful people on planet Earth today. Why are they famous? How do they have their money? How did they get there? By owning and buying businesses. It's a very difficult thing to master, but at the end of the day, you need to master it If you don't want to be stuck in a nine to five job where you're living paycheck to paycheck. You can't afford to get anywhere. Go anywhere, do anything with your life. If you can't afford to take your girlfriend out to dinner, if you can't afford to pay for your mother's retirement, if you can't afford to buy yourself a nice vehicle that you can actually take to work and look nice, then perhaps starting a business is the better move than keeping a 9-to-5 job, relying on the system, relying on the government, because guess what?

Speaker 1: 4:11

Our founding fathers didn't believe that the government was always right. Our founding fathers didn't believe that owning a business was this bad thing, quite. Actually, it was the opposite. Our founding fathers, when they fled Britain, they knew that they needed to start a business in order to succeed. They knew that in order to make money for their families, for their offspring, they would need to start businesses and have some kind of trade. They would need to sell and make money. They would need to have some kind of currency so that way they could have the influence and power they did. So what did our founding fathers do when they came to the new world? They started businesses.

Speaker 1: 4:42

Yes, you can say oh well, brendan, our founding fathers were a bunch of Freemasons. Maybe all of those things are true on some level. The truth is, we have to look at history and read history as a textbook for the future. Our founding fathers believed that business was a way to have independence. There's a reason every year you celebrate Independence Day why? Because Independence Day celebrates your ability to own your own business, to be yourself, to be who you want to be, to think about what you want to think about, to believe in what you want to believe in, to say what you want to say and not be suppressed of your speech. All of these things were because of our founding fathers, who were very revered and intelligent, very bright, foreseeing men, brave men, courageous men. They weren't just courageous and they weren't just savvy, but they were smart. They were able to see far, far into the future and write a document the constitution that to this day still holds the validity and strength and continues to be upheld in our Congress, in our court of law.

Speaker 1: 5:34

When I became a police officer, I had to give an oath, an oath that I still believe in. So you need to start a business. So, before you even start a business, you need to start a business. So, before you even start a business, you need to learn why most businesses fail. And that's what the point of this episode really is about. It's talking about why businesses don't succeed, why most businesses never reach that next level. In my opinion, based on my experience at least, business is a game. It's an infinite game that keeps playing. It's never finished. It's just like fashion Fashion is never finished.

Speaker 1: 5:58

The reason most fail in business is because business requires consistency. Most people cannot be consistent. In my first ever YouTube episode, I talked about the five key elements to success. Number one taking action. Number two consistency. Number three persistence. Number four speed. And number five information, knowledge. Those are important things that you need to know in business and all of them need to work together or else you have no business, because if those five key elements are not met, then you cannot run a successful business. You must have those five key elements in place before you can ever think about starting a business.

Speaker 1: 6:30

Another reason businesses fail very often is because people quit. People quit too early and it's again goes back to consistency, but it also goes back to taking action. It goes back to all five of those key elements, essentially, but most people tend to quit when things get hard, when they run out of money, they give up. They say this is impossible as entrepreneurs, when you see money coming out every single month from usually subscriptions or something like that. You start to think to yourself oh my God, how am I going to get that next client? Am I going to be able to do this? Am I going to be able to make this work? And at the end of the day, most people say no, I won't. I have to go to my nine to five job in order to make this work. Nope, I should just give this up. This is too risky. I got a family to think about. But I say, yeah, you do have a family to think.

Speaker 1: 7:13

Unsustainable Businesses that just don't even make sense. Sometimes they have businesses that they don't even know what they're doing in it. They just want to get rich in it. But the truth is nothing can just make you rich overnight, no matter how simple and easy the business can be. If you're going to get rich, do it in a way that's going to make you proud. If you're going to get rich, do it in a way that's going to make your family proud, that's going to represent and honor your offspring. Geez, don't make it so easy for people. You know, have some pride in yourself. A lot of the time, people don't even realize or care where they're going with their life, they just oh, whatever, whatever Doesn't matter to me. I'll just live how I want. I'll be free.

Speaker 1: 7:59

So we talk about sustainable business models. Well, let's talk deeper about it. What is a sustainable business model? What is a sustainable business model? Are customers coming back? Is your service affordable for everyone? Do you have a business that you can actually sell in the future?

Speaker 1: 8:14

Is your business going to exist by causation of time? Is your business going to become irrelevant, meaning that, for example, if you still own a newspaper company, you're probably not going to be so profitable. You're probably going to really struggle. You're probably going to have a lot of difficulties in a world where everything's digital, so maybe you shouldn't own a newspaper business. If your business can withstand the test of time, then your business is going to be around a long time. If your business is something like an AI company, for example, then your business has a good chance of being at the top of the leaderboard in the next decade. If your business is a newspaper business, then you're probably going to get washed out. You're probably going to get destroyed by all of the AI news companies that are going to be coming out. So you have to start thinking ahead of the game. If you want a business that's going to make success for you, for your family, then you need to be living on the edge. Your business needs to be cutting edge. Your business needs to be state of the art. Your business needs to be crushing it in such a way that the future says we need that.

Speaker 1: 9:12

What are some other sustainable business models, though? Well, it's business models that can make you money while you sleep. So let's list a few of those. Real estate you can make money while you sleep from real estate. E-commerce you can make money while you sleep from e-commerce. Owning an agency you can make money while you sleep running an agency, having a project manager doing all of that for you. Laundromats, storage facilities, fedex routes, dental practices, chiropractor offices, opening up any kind of financial services these are the businesses that you want to buy. These are all sustainable business models that people need. It's in demand. Is your business in demand? Do you have a business that business owners right now are Googling and they need it? You need to have a business that's in demand.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Another reason businesses fail Maybe you don't have the right supply, maybe there's not enough supply for what you have. Listen, at the end of the day, markets get saturated. So if you're a police officer like me, guess what? There's a lot of police officers out there. You're pretty easily replaceable. Every single academy, you have about 30 to 60 different new recruits coming through that could potentially take your spot.

Speaker 1: 10:10

As a police officer, you are absolutely replaceable. As a cop, as a nurse, you're replaceable. There's a lot of you. Nurses, there's a lot of you. But a lawyer not so replaceable. A neurosurgeon not so replaceable. A CEO not so replaceable. But can you do it right? Can you make it last? Can you make a business out of whatever the thing is?

Speaker 1: 10:30

Another reason businesses fail Is it too stressful? Is it just like too time consuming, too complicated, too complex? You know, is the average person going to be able to say damn, that's a good idea? I wish I would have thought of it. A huge reason that businesses fail is because there really isn't a belief system integrated within that business, so the owner might not believe in the cause, the resolve, the reason, the why.

Speaker 1: 10:54

As a CEO, as entrepreneurs, we must know exactly what we want, because, at the end of the day, being an entrepreneur is harder than being a nine-to-five employee. Me personally, I think being a business owner is definitely going to be harder in terms of the work, what needs to be done In order to make it successful. It requires much more difficult tasks to be accomplished versus a nine to five job. Getting accomplished the right way. A nine to five job requires a very certain specialist set of tasks. As a nine to five employee, you're probably a specialist at what you do. You're probably a professional at that one thing, whatever it might be. So if you're an accountant, then that is your specialty. If you're a CPA, you are a CPA. That is your specialty, your specific thing that you do.

Speaker 1: 11:38

But as an entrepreneur, you have to do one of every single little thing. You have to be a jack of all trades. You have to be able to juggle multiple different skills. You have to know a little bit of everything. You have to know how to negotiate. You got to know how to put offers together. You have to be able to do a little bit of tech stuff. You got to know how to run advertising. You got to understand it. You got to know what you're talking about. You need to know what you're doing.

Speaker 1: 12:05

The reason most businesses fail is because business is absolutely, extremely difficult. Business requires a lot of time, focus, energy and you got to be able to do multiple things, and that's the reason most people can't do business. It's too overwhelming. Another reason businesses fail is because you were never taught this in school. You're never educated on how to run a business. It's a different mindset, it's a different psychology completely.

Speaker 1: 12:24

When you're running a business, you need to learn leadership. You need to know how to hire people, how to talk to people. You have to know how to get on a sales call and actually ask people for their money and know that once you take that money, that you have a service and an obligation that must be fulfilled. There's an understanding by your client that you were going to fulfill a certain service for the amount of money that they gave you. So because of that, don't be a scam artist, entrepreneur, which is another reason a lot of entrepreneurs and businesses fail because they try to do it the wrong way. They do it the easy way and they do it the illegal way, or they just try to be really just scammy and just, you know, just not good people. Be a good person. If you be a good person, you'll have a good business and I can promise you that you will have good clients. If you're a good person, you'll have a good business. If you have a good business, you'll have good people working for you and coming in to work with you. See, if you try to partner with companies who are going to take everything from you, who are going to scam you and con you, well, maybe that's a contract.

Speaker 1: 13:20

Most of the time why businesses fail Contracts, a lot of business owners feel like a contract isn't necessary. They feel like, for the time being, they just want the fast money. When we start making money, we'll pay for contracts. We'll pay for lawyers to draft some things up. Unfortunately, in business, it's important that you have contracts written. There needs to be clear guidelines. Okay, not everything can just be about making money and making your life so easy. No, that's just not how it works. You're going to need to do things correctly in the right way. Contracts are everything. Contracts are very important. If you ever have a client who doesn't want to sign a contract, then that's on them, it's not on you as the business owner. Contracts.

Speaker 1: 13:54

The last reason I would say that businesses fail tends to be because of family, and I hate to say it but it's true Family will be the first ones to get in your way. Thinking about starting a business, thinking about buying a business. Your family will be the first ones to call you crazy, to think you're stupid for doing it, to think you're an imbecile for doing it and to think that you're a loser. Whatever it might be, your family will be the first ones who will doubt you. Chances are maybe you have really supportive parents, which is great. The odds are, parents don't want you to take risks. Your parents are not going to want you to do things that are a little bit more outside of the social norms. Your parents want you to be safe. Your parents want you to have a good life, a good job, stability and structure. So that is why 90% of parents are going to look at you when you say mom, dad, I want to be an entrepreneur one day. I want to be a CEO, I want to be a business owner.

Speaker 1: 14:42

You go and tell mom and dad that mom and dad are going to say, well, you better hope you have a job while you're doing it, and it's going to make you mad. It's going to make you think oh wow, you don't believe in me, huh? And the answer is going to be. Yes, you're right, they don't believe in you at all. You can't just accept it. You need to draw lines. You need to go for it, because you don't have much time. Time is of the essence in business.

Speaker 1: 15:02

Again, we talked about speed and why speed is important, why most businesses fail. They don't do things quickly enough, they don't do things fast enough. The reason most businesses fail is because everybody's slow, and it's usually going to be the CEO. It's always going to be your fault, business owner. If your business sucks right now, there's a pretty good chance it's your fault. Probably is your fault. It is your fault to begin with. You're the leader, so you need to be a great leader as a business owner, or else you're gonna have a business that what Fails. So don't have a business that fails. Have a business that succeeds and does well. That's a better outcome, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 15:35

Listen, you need to ask yourself what do you want the most in life Out of business? Why do you want to start a business? Why is it important to you? Why do you need to succeed? Because, at the end of the day, that's what's most important. What is most important to you. And if you ask me, what's most important is your family, is yourself, the way you feel about yourself enjoying your life, being able to do anything you want when you want, being able to think about what you want to think about, being able to not be stressed because of bills, being able to not be stressed because of your children going to college, being able to afford all of it, a vacation every single month that is what you should be striving for Making money while you sleep.

Speaker 1: 16:07

Don't be like the businesses that fail for all of the reasons we've talked about today. Be like the businesses that succeed because they went after it and they took the leap and they learned, they educated themselves and they never quit. They never gave up. As soon as you give up, you lose, but as soon as you stay persistent, you're learning. And, ladies and gentlemen, that is a wrap. That is my list of reasons why businesses fail, why they don't reach success and why you need to not make those same mistakes and you need to take this advice. And also you need to make sure that you subscribe, make sure that you leave a review and also make sure that you tell a friend about this podcast, about this show, and spread the word. Ladies and gentlemen, I got nothing else Stay prudent, stay powerful and stay wealthy.