In our local area, the media are reporting that 500 businesses have failed during 2006.

Even if half of that is true it’s too many, some might be secondary businesses that are operated by a family or an off shoot of a group of investors. Some might be moves to new locations, others could be re branding, or upgrades from sole trader to Pty Ltd etc… Any way you look at it however, in a community of 200,000 people there are still a lot of out and out failures.

In a world of readily available information, of resources to assist people, of courses on business etc, etc. We still have failures.

Imagine if each of the 250 (half the reported number) lost $20,000 each that’s $5,000,000! that’s too much in personal pain for me to contemplate. Lets face it, it would not be difficult to lose that amount in shop fittings, advertising that failed, paying out staff, the list goes on.

I hope the number of failures is a lost less than that, but in the cold hard light of day any failures are bad news.

Lesson 1. Do your homework, lesson 2… Get great information on how to build a robust business and keep it that way! Lesson 3… Just because there is an empty shop, factory or warehouse, does not mean there is automatically capacity for another business to fill that space

Source: Geelong News Aug 20 2008 Page 5.

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