​The proliferation of business seminars focusing on low-capital-and-easy-to-produce products have resulted to so many start-up failures. Examples of these seminars include soap-making, candle-making, screen-printing,  flower arrangement, and many others. As you can see, the focus of these business seminars is the low technology requirement as well as the low barrier to entry (meaning, anybody can join the industry without much capital). They are so simple such that the focus of the seminars is to show you that they are so easy and inexpensive to produce. The focus is the left side of the above diagram.

What you will not learn is about the right side of the diagram above - the customers, the competition, and the industry you will be competing in. What do customers really need and how do you compete in their minds.

Later, you will find out that learning how to produce the product is not the end of it. What makes the venture fail is the need for skills and big capital to spend for packaging, advertising, and distribution. They totally forgot about the growing competition from big and small companies, which sprouted because anything that is easy to produce invites many competitors. The seminar participant, who only have a few hundreds in his pocket is made to believe that if only he can learn to produce the product in small quantity, he will have a business and can be successful. That's not totally true! Been there, done that. 

The whole point here is that you should be deeply analytical and not believing anything at face value. Start with the customer and the industry analysis.

To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to have a bat. Yes, just like the baseball bat, figuratively, so you can hit the ball flying. BAT stands for 

• Business skills
• Attitude
• Technical skills

​When I say business skills, it means everything that the business school teaches. Although, you may not need a formal business school education, it helps to know the basic teachings in business, which fortunately, can now be learned outside the school. Aside from formal schooling, you can learn from your past business ventures, whether successful or a failure. You can also learn from the internet, from so many published insights and experiences of successful and unsuccesful people. In this internet age, you don't need to experience it yourself to learn from it. Instead, learn from others' experiences. Learning more about the business principle and practices helps you calculate the risks involved and avoid unnecessary failure.

More inspiring BAT discussion in the succeeding blogs.