How to Ruin Your Business

The primary cause of company failure is sometimes found in the company top.

Professor Per Nikolaj Bukh at Aalborg University, Denmark, has identified eight leadership tendencies that can kill your company.

The common denominator behind the eight tendencies is that the entrepreneur who has built a successful business thinks that he can handle everything himself, believing that the success of the company is singularly attributable to his superiority in decision-making and leadership.

This little guide, which is based directly on these eight tendencies, is so easy to follow that many company owners have already taken it to heart. Here is a tried-and-tested "how to ruin your business," no matter how great your products are or how competent your employees might be.

1. Decide Everything

Since you're the owner of your company that built your own business, it's you who can and should decide everything. You made the decisions when you created your company and made it what it is, and that means you should go on doing this. You may have hired subordinate managers since then, but don't let that keep you from making their decisions for them.

Make sure you become the bottleneck, and never mind the fact that although it's manageable to make all of the decisions in company with 15 employees, it's impossible with 200 employees. Also, don't pay attention to the fact that your subordinate managers become disgruntled and demotivated because their influence does not match their responsibilities.

2. Lose the Financial Overview

As your company grows, company finances become more difficult to control, and at some point a single person cannot manage the finances without an advanced business finance system that can provide an accurate picture of the financial status. Don't let that keep you from maintaining the financial records in your own head.

3. Go for Any Opportunity

The market is ripe with opportunities. Don't spend time stabilizing and consolidating your company with all these opportunities for making money. Let your development, customer promises, and deliverables slide while you you seek new avenues for profit.

4. Stay as Long as You Can

It's your company, right? If you must hand over your company to a successor, stay in your company and make the decisions as you always did, without mentoring your successor who won't get the required insight in the company to truly take over when the time comes.

5. Stick to Your Own Methods

You're a busy person, and you have lots of things to do. You won't have time to get out of your office and learn new techniques or get inspired by your staff. Using your known methods and sticking with your known tools beats skill building any time, even if it means your methods are outdated compared with those of your competitors.

6. Rely on Key Employees

If you delegate work, make sure you don't make the delegation role based. Your trusted employees must be named, few, and vital to your work so that you'll lose critical knowledge and skills if they are hired by other companies.

7. Make Wrong Investments

Your company is successful because you built it yourself. Don't outsource production tasks, and don't buy components from suppliers, but develop tools and components yourself.

Your best choice is to use your own investments for these developments, such as having your staff work on them. Firstly, such investments aren't clearly visible on your ledger, and secondly you know better than to trust academic business principles such as demanding a higher revenue from invested money than from borrowed money to justify the expenses.

8. Get the Bad Customers

The more customers the better, so focus on sales. Don't spend valuable time evaluating the customer's expected order placements or ability to pay, and don't spend time determining whether the customer matches the needs of your company. You need all the customers you can get, so don't reject customers that place too small or too large orders.