Successful business owners are successful, in many cases, because they did not make the same mistakes their contemporaries in similar businesses made. No business can survive if it insists on making all the possible mistakes themselves. In the 21st century, based on terrible examples of mega business failures many communities, even states, have now pinned their hopes on entrepreneurs and small businesses for their security and growth.
They have seen the news stories of how other communities in other parts of the country have moved away from their focus on capturing big companies, thus putting all their eggs in one basket, and supporting small and family owned businesses. Many giant companies have failed. Others are failing every day. But, at the same time many small business owners are doing well and expect continued growth, even though it does not make news or maybe because they are flying under the radar.
In today's business environment company owners believe that if they are doing well, even great, the best strategy is to keep it to themselves. Many successful family businesses have a person whose job is to keep them out of the news. Big publicly held companies, there aren't that many of them really but they do burn up the airways with their news releases, trumpet their successes and are hammered by their failures - in public.
The vast majority of all companies, privately held and family owned, can check the news from these giants, take what's working for themselves and avoid their mistakes. Think about it. If you have a great idea for starting or growing your business and you read business news stories illustrating how a company with seemingly unlimited resources failed in their attempt to do the same thing, you'd want to know it.
You might go ahead with it anyway, but you'd be better informed and less likely to make their mistakes. You'll have plenty of your own without repeating the ones reported about in the business news. Publicly held companies are required to tell the news outlets anything and everything that might affect their credit rating or their stock prices.
Small business owners and entrepreneurs can go to school on their mistakes. Especially if they can consolidate business news reports from numerous outlets at the same time, for a wide ranging and in depth perspective. Small businesses historically do well during downtimes. Using various business news outlets and news consolidating services successful entrepreneurs do real-time research, looking for opportunities and land mines.
Startups or even businesses in the pre-startup phase can avoid mistakes that would cripple them. Existing companies can use consolidated business news reports to identify new markets, expand their company either horizontally or vertically or both to leverage their existing market position. And every company can use the experiences they see described in an RSS feed or a white paper to test their own business assumptions, before taking action rather than after they've lost their business, farm, or home on a sure-fire idea.
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