Why Businesses Fail

You’ve already heard it: 90% of business startups end up in failures. Of those who do stay in business, a very small percentage do well – perhaps about 2% - the rest just get by, barely survive, or stay mediocre.

Why such a high rate of failure? I believe it’s because we have not identified and developed the right business habits that produce the results we want. This is why reading books does not make us successful, healthy, fit, wealthy or even happy. Neither do writing a thesis or graduating with Honors from an Ivy League University.

Business Building is a sport. You can’t learn how to play tennis or golf by reading a book, writing a thesis or graduating with Honors after two years of intense studies. The theoretical knowledge is a good start, but to truly master the sport, we need to engage with it emotionally, enjoy it, practice it often, and master it in small incremental steps.

Why “Business Habits” are Important

What we habitually, consistently do, perhaps even without thinking, like driving a car, defines us to a great extent. Our habits drive our successes and our failures. Our habits make us efficient or inefficient. Our habits make us healthy or unhealthy, sharp or dull, wealthy or poor.

Because a business is made of people, the same holds true for businesses. The habits of a business defines its character. Habits drive its successes and failures. Habits make it thrive or wither away and die. Habits make it a market leader or a mediocre survivor. Habits bring out great lines of successful products or failures after failures.

Good business habits bring us good results. Bad business habits bring us bad results. Great business habits bring great results and terrific business habits bring us terrific business results.

Breaking Bad Business Habits and Developing Good Ones

Needless to say, breaking old habits is difficult. So is building new ones. What makes this process - of breaking old habits and building new ones - especially difficult is the fact that we often really don’t know what habit we should be adopting. We really don’t know what the best practices are for our business’ success.

If we are to succeed as a business, we must committ to reinventing ourselves as the world around us changes. Obviously, continuous reinvention, in small, incremental steps, is far easier than abrupt reinvention.

There is no better way to reinvent our business than to examine, and then change, its business habits, slowly, deliberately, incrementally and constantly.

What Makes Business Habits: Awayre Layers

I have been researching this subject - the best business practices and habits for a successful business - for over 12 years. Some of what I have found is simple common sense. Some of it is truly ground-breaking. And much of it seems like ground-breaking stuff but it really is common sense.

Over the years I have developed a model, called Awayre LayersTM, that brings these findings together in teachable, repeatable patterns and systems and yet allows enough freedom for a business to customize it for its own use.

It simply means that we have the ability – Consciousness or Awareness – to deal with our habitual structures that make our Business Habits. And that we also have the power to break old Business Habits that don’t work and replace them with new ones that do.

Habits are developed over time. Some habits take a long time to break. The good news is that there are proven ways to break those old habits and develop new ones.

There are dormant human faculties that can come to aid in breaking down old habits and developing news ones. There 7 distinct areas, layers if you will, of these faculties. When we bring these faculties into alignment with each other and apply them properly, powerful forces are unleashed that allow us to go deep into these old habitual structures and build new ones.

Ripples of Consciousness

Awayre Layers consists of 7 layers that are represented as 7 concentric circles, one inside the other, like ripples from a water drop.

Starting from the innermost to outermost, these layers are:

   1. Inspiration Point/Essence
   2. True Knowledge/Wisdom
   3. Social Identity/Ego
   4. Strategy/Intellect
   5. Engagement/Emotions
   6. Energy/Vitality
   7. Systems/Actions

When a business’s foundation is as deep as the Inspiration Point of its people, it performs at levels unheard of before. When a business’s boundaries are defined by the consistent, habitual, aligned actions of its people, it can predictably and consistently repeat that high performance over a long period of time.

Where do these Seven Layers come from?

Much of this is pure and simple human psychology that I have learned, taught, used and applied in my 10-plus years as a trainer, coach and a business builder. Some of it comes from a Sage, a Mystic and a Scientist from ancient India named Patanjali (today’s Yoga is derived from his treaties on human development), who proposed a structure much more complex than these seven layers. The Seven Layers are a summary based on the original observations of Patanjali along with the studies of modern psychiatry mixed with the ancient Chinese philosophies of Tao, Tai Chi and Zen.

There are perhaps many other ways to represent this system. But this system, in my experience, is a good balance between making this subject overly simplified, like Freud’s study of Phychiatry with Id, Ego and Super Ego or the popular “New Age” way of four (Spiritual, Intellectual, Emotional and Physical) and the very complex original works that are, of course, more accurate but difficult to grasp. This seven layer model, to me, summarizes this complex study well enough to make it practical for study and application in business.

That’s why, one of the ways that I have organized the contents in this blog is by these seven layers.

Experience It?

Want to experience the power of Awayre Layers? Invite us in for a 2-hour Executive Briefing or a “business workout session” where you get to practice business-building by the Way of Awareness. Contact me at bhavesh@ambica.net to get started or visit our website at http://www.awayre.com.

Want a Better World? Build a Better Business!

If you are a business owner, President, CEO, a leader responsible for Profit and Loss of a corporate division, a non-profit or a government department, you have a choice to make. 

You can choose to see your job as just that, a job to make a living, pay bills and have nice things in life. 

Or you can choose to see your job as creating a world within the world. A world that’s financially prosperous, successful and happy, thriving and growing. If you want to make the world a better place, as most leaders I know do, the best place to start is with your own business or profit and loss unit.


Your Business is a Social Force

Can we create a world in which every human being is empowered to create a life he or she wants? I believe it’s possible. I also believe that business, the institution of business, is uniquely positioned to create such a world.

Muhammad Yunus is the Founder of Grameen Bank and the winner of the Nobel Peace Price in 2006. In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, he shared the idea of “Social Business.” His idea of a social business is the one in which you are only concerned about the society and not about profits.

I think Mr. Yunus is a phenomenal human being and what he has achieved is extra-ordinary. I do believe that his idea of the Social Business is just one side of a spectrum. On the other side of the spectrum, you have a business that’s only concerned with profits, sales and market share.

One is a Social Business; the other is a Selfish Business.

I believe that a business can be both. I’m not proposing that you somehow need to strike a balance between the two. What I’m saying is that it’s possible for a business to hit all its financial target AND be making a contribution to the society. And when we get this right, charity, doing good and making the world a better place do not have to be a part-time activity; it becomes full-time activity.

If every business in the world got to that point, it becomes a social force. And if we make every business in the world a social force, the whole Institution of Business becomes a social force.

According to Peter Drucker, business is the most influential institution in the world today. More so even than the Church, Government, Family, Education and Military. Business, as an institution, has the power to create the world that we have all, at some level, yearned for.

“One World through Business,” is not only possible. If we are to solve our problems and bring the world together as one, it is inevitable. Business of the future is such a business. It’s a socially conscious business. But it’s also a selfish business. It’s a socio-selfish business!