“One third of all new businesses fail by the two-year mark, and almost 60% fold within four years, according to a 2005 Monthly Labor Review study. But resilience can be rewarded. So can keeping a positive perspective.”

You can find a lot more famous failures in Business Week’s slideshow. This rather sobering statistic haunts me as my parents were one of the almost 2/3rds that failed within four years.

Our own business is rather progressing but after six years we are still facing every day challenges and problems. I had hoped that by this point things would be going much more smoothly. That has not happened. I have changed my attitude much more instead as I used to believe that having no problems was a sign of strength. Now I’m beginning to see that the opposite is true. Facing challenges, however, is not a sign of weakness, rather a sign of strength for three reasons:

• Problems are a sign that something is not working, and that it is time to change.

For example, your marketing isn’t working and your new sales are dropping. Perhaps it’s time to find a new channel, a new promotion, a bigger advertisement budget…

• Problems are an indication that there is something that you need to know that you haven’t figured out yet.

A good example might be that your team isn’t functioning well. Communication isn’t flowing smoothly between all the members. This happened in my work place, actually. Some parts of the team communicated, but others didn’t. It’s time to figure out what is going wrong in the dynamics, and set up whatever solutions are appropriate: formal meetings, private times with the less connected members, more memos, etc..

• Problems show that the current situation has stresses that you need to resolve.

Perhaps the way you are handling customer problems, by giving excess discounts, etc., creates unwanted tensions elsewhere in the business. A customer complains about the cost of a product, you provide a concession. Another customer comes up having heard about it and wonders why s/he doesn’t have the same concession.

Such situations abound, but the important idea is to observe objectively what is going on, examine the causes, look at solutions, try them out, and collect data on the effects of changes. Such information will then help you to make more informed solutions in the future.

Most of all, though, don’t let the problems you face in your business cause you business problems that you don’t want to face.

You’d better hurry if you want that $10 bonus. Google Checkout writes:

Sign up to earn your $10 bonus
If you’re new to Checkout,
!E Sign up between February 16, 2007 and March 31, 2007, and we’ll automatically apply your bonus to your first purchase of $10 or more (pre-shipping & tax) from participating stores.
!E Bonus expires April 30, 2007 and can’t be used with other Checkout promotions.
!E Limit one per buyer only.

So, don’t delay! If you’re going to do some online shopping, you can save yourself $10 or you can buy $10 more worth of goodies! hah! And Google Checkout is accepting registrations from many countries now! The challenge now though might be getting orders to your home country!

Truthfully, we’ve been in business for more than six years, and I’ve been finding the last six months TOUGH! To summarize, we thought we had made a breakthrough last year, but… we have just fallen back to the way things were before.Our business has a lot of repeat and long-term customers, who come back regularly. BUT as their kids get older, other options begin to seem more relevant to their children. Parents’ ideas change too. So when the kids grow up, their circumstances change. This summer saw a particularly volatile period of older customers leaving and new ones arriving. From May to September, we lost nearly 20 customers, which is a large batch of our customer base. We picked up some to replace the exiting customers. Some of that couldn’t be avoided, though. I guess we should have seen it coming. Actually, we did, but it came sooner than we expected in many cases.

It is frustrating to manage a business, only to discover that the biggest problem you face is in fact your own shortcomings. Our business really needs to find a way to market ourselves effectively in the local community, to make our personalities more prominent, and to become more persuasive perhaps. A tall order in my book, as I am not a leader type personality. But I think I may have to become such.

So we set to and produced our own little newsletter. We first ran a demo in November with about 20-40 copies given away. We found a column writer who is able to write the column on the back of the newsletter, we created some appropriate content for the front page, and we wrote the content for the inner pages. The first issue came out in December, and the second in February.  Each time we have given away over 200 copies.

In fact, I think it has helped to bring in some customers. I found that people pick them up from the distribution point, and sometimes come straight in to ask about our products and services, newsletter in hand!

I’m now looking at other low-level, in your face flyers and similar for our business. Stay tuned!