Finance and Business Errors
Business and financial mistakes can be costly and cause other serious complications. While it can help to learn from mistakes, it is also better to avoid such situations whenever possible.
There are often conflicting messages about errors. There are plenty of sources that talk about how healthy it is not to worry about making mistakes as long as you learn something productive in the process. There is another point of view on how important it is to avoid mistakes whenever possible. In the end, both perspectives may be accurate. There are several books that focus on the positive aspects of mistakes. Here are three main examples:
“Mistakes That Work” by Charlotte Jones
“Celebrating Failure: The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes and Thinking Big” by Ralph Heath
“Better by Mistakes: Unexpected Benefits of False” by Alina Tugend
In the world of finance and business, mistakes are often talked about in terms of how expensive they are. But these mistakes make no less likely in the business and financial environment than elsewhere. In fact, recent book titles suggest otherwise:
“Think Smart – Act Smart: Avoiding the Business Mistakes Intelligent People Make Once” by J. Nightingale
Since some business financial mistakes tend to cause bigger problems than others, these errors can serve as a practical illustration of what to avoid at all costs. Here are a few that typically fall into the “avoid where possible” category:
- Lack of contingent business plans
- Don’t know when the bank should be fired
- Too much business debt
No matter how prepared they are to avoid mistakes like those shown above in bullet points, most company managers and small business owners will be exposed to one or more opportunities to learn these mistakes at some point in their careers. Of the three, contingent business planning offers the best opportunity to help avoid business and financial mistakes, and it is therefore prudent to take steps to ensure that contingent business plans are used effectively in organizations of all sizes.
Not knowing when to fire your bank is a mistake that will be very difficult to fix, and this is why mistakes like this should be avoided or eliminated in the first place. In the most positive outcome for this example, contingent business planning (if used effectively) can often facilitate an entirely different outcome where firing the bank is made unnecessary by better negotiating and communicating. Yet even when these positive results are not feasible, contingency planning can contribute to replacing one commercial lender for another much more smoothly.