The don’ts of starting a business are somewhat like dating. Someone can tell you to your face over and over again what not to do, but more often than not, you’ll find people that would rather try it for themselves, think their situation is different, or their ego tells them reality doesn’t apply… With that, here’s some don’ts that you should pay attention to:

Trust:
Don’t entrust any business-critical facet of your startup to anyone other than yourself or someone who is directly, monetarily liable to the company’s success while you’re in the beginning stages. Which leads me to…

Liability:
Dedication to business ownership is directly relational to monetary liability. Don’t partner or buddy up with someone who wants a piece of your action without input that can affect their pocket negatively.

Growth:
Success is a great feeling and most entrepreneurs are ambitious little devils that love the feeling of “it’s working!”… especially in the form of monies. That’s all fine and great, but, before you go off to growing your venture ahead of schedule, do to awesome profit, remember that chances are you created a plan with the idea of failure (or avoiding it) in your head. When success is knocking on your door, though it might seem like you’re doing better than you were expecting, you should go with your initial instinct and hold off on growth until after a run of continued success.

Revising:
If, by some act of awesome, you’re doing so much better than you ever thought you could, before you dump profits into assets, think about revisiting your business plan, and perhaps reworking it to better reflect the reaction your customer base is having to your product/service. Just be sure you put yourself on a solid timeline that can be followed – and make it reasonable, including nice, handy, long-term goals.

Under no circumstances should you be hands off on pieces of your startup that are mission critical. Sales, billing, estimates, customer communications, delivery and QA should at the very least be overseen, overviewed and looked at by you. It is your company… Be it.

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