7 Business Mistakes to Avoid in 2025
Every thriving business owner knows that success isn't just about having a brilliant idea. It's about avoiding the pitfalls that can drain your resources and stunt your growth. Drawing on over a decade of entrepreneurship, I've learned invaluable lessons that have shaped my journey with Productive Insights. From managing cash flow to resisting the lure of shiny new tools, each lesson has been a stepping stone towards building a sustainable and profitable business. In this blog post, I'll share seven critical mistakes to avoid, so you can navigate your business journey with greater confidence and wisdom.Links Mentioned:
- ProductiveInsights.com/membership
- Chris Do Full Interview
- Business Mistakes Playlist
- 9 Step Business Course
Timestamp:
00:00 Introduction: The Importance of Cash Flow
00:11 The Journey Begins: From MBA to Entrepreneur
00:43 Finding Clarity and Freedom in Business
01:21 Mistake 1: Subscription Creep
02:20 Mistake 2: Buying Shiny Objects
03:37 Mistake 3: Consuming not Creating
04:17 Mistake 4: Chasing too many goals simultaneously
05:25 Mistake 5: Not Defining Your Target Audience
07:08 Mistake 6: Underpricing My Services
08:09 Mistake 7: Revenue, Profit, and Cash Flow
09:07 Conclusion: Learn from My Mistakes
Ash Roy's Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Ash Roy: Cash flow to your business is like oxygen for your brain. If you're not making enough cash, you're not gonna be in business for very long.
Today I wanna share with you seven important lessons I've learned. It was 2005 and I was standing right here at the rocks at Coogee Beach, which is not far from the famous Bondi Beach, which is just down that way.
And I just finished my MBA and I made the decision to become an entrepreneur. It's now been about 10 years since I've started my business Productive Insights and to say it's been an exhilarating and fulfilling journey would be an understatement. So grab a coffee. Let's talk about it.
You see, I've been coming here for over 20 years and I find it's a wonderful place to really relax, look at the broader picture and think about what matters in life and therefore, in my business, it helps me get clear about my priorities and the direction that I want to go in. And something that's been common all along is the idea of freedom.
And maybe that's why I love the open ocean, because it represents freedom, openness, opportunity. I've been building and scaling Productive Insights for well over a decade now, and I've learned a lot of lessons along the way. And today I wanna share with you seven important lessons I've learned. Let's do this.
Lesson number one, subscription creep death by a thousand cuts. You know those subscriptions, they add up really fast, $5, $10, $15, and when you lose track of them, they start to burn your business down because at the end of the day, cash, as they say, is king and queen and everything else in your business.
So here's my first piece of advice. Watch your cashflow. When I started to track all my subscriptions and ruthlessly eliminated the ones I wasn't using, my cashflow started to come back on track and I was amazed by how much pressure that took off me because your cash flow in your business is like oxygen.
If you don't have enough cash flow coming in, you can't think straight and you can't make good decisions. I found I was operating from a position of lack. I had a poverty mindset a lot of the time, and I was making decisions that was steeped in a world of lack and that my friend is not a great way to grow a business.
My second big mistake, which actually impacted my cash flow and drove me even further down the hole, was buying shiny objects to get that short term dopamine hit instead of doing the hard work and shipping more content and more products that made a difference to my audience for a long time, I kept telling myself that I needed this new thing and that was gonna make a big difference to my business.
Here's an example. I bought myself a DSLR camera because I thought that was the thing I needed at that time, but the truth is that actually slowed me down rather than helped me to create more content because now I had to learn how to use that DSLR camera and I had to take courses. And the truth is, if I had just used my iPhone, I would've probably made much more progress because while the production quality wouldn't have been as great, I would've put more content out there and I would've grown my YouTube channel a lot faster.
Now, I'm not saying don't invest in good quality equipment. Absolutely do so, but don't do it at the expense of creating great content and shipping products and solutions to your audience consistently and delivering value so you can build your brand. That should be your primary focus. Execution trumps perfection all day, every day.
Over the last decade, I've probably bought hundreds of courses and I've completed maybe less than I can count on two hands. This is something I'm not proud of, but a very painful lesson I've learned over the years. When you buy a new course, it's like buying a new shiny object. You get this short-term dopamine hit and you feel like you've accomplished something, but the truth is, if you don't execute on the course you're not gonna get any results. You're just gonna be further in the hole as far as your cash flow is concerned.
So the lesson I learned from this was don't buy new courses until you've completed the courses you already have, and at least executed something from those courses. So the one in one out principle.
A big mistake I've seen a lot of my members make in our membership community for the last six years now is chasing too many goals at the same time. It feels like you're being really productive when you've got a lot of plates spinning in the air. But the truth is, if you want to be truly successful, it makes sense to pursue one goal until you have escaped velocity on that goal, or you've reached some level of mastery before you move to the next one, and by mastery or escape velocity, what I mean is you've built some kind of a system or a process so that that goal can continue to be achieved or work towards independently of you. Maybe you hire a team or you hire a system or a combination of the two to keep moving yourself towards that goal.
So for example, you might start off by publishing content on LinkedIn regularly. But over time you start automating parts of that process so that the content is still coming from you, but you've built systems using things like chat, GPT, AI agents, and other such things to be able to speed up the process of content production and get it to market faster.
My next big mistake was not defining my target audience clearly, it's like paddling out into the ocean, waiting for a wave to come along, but you realize that you are in the wrong part of the ocean altogether. For the longest time, I avoided getting very clear about who my target market was. Because the truth is figuring out who your target market is, is hard work.
It's kind of boring too. You're faced with this overwhelming choice of a world of 8 billion potential buyers, and you've gotta pick one target audience that is gonna resonate with your message and your product. One target audience that has a specific problem that you can solve. And it's pretty scary when you have to pick a tiny target audience because you worry that you're leaving opportunities on the table and profit on the table.
Because you might be focusing on too small a niche, but in practice, the opposite is true. The more specific you are about your target audience, the more specific you are about the problem you're going to solve, the more likely you are to have a clear message that resonates with that specific audience and the more likely you are to make sales.
Because you're more likely to solve a specific problem that they're willing to pay you to solve. So the lesson I learned then, and I seem to learn over and over again is get specific about who you want to serve and what problem you want to solve. These days I'm focused on helping service-based business owners to scale their businesses using content strategies that actually work.
If you'd like to learn more about the solutions we offer, then head over to productive insights.com/membership. And that's the quickest way for us to get started working together. Please note that you do have to apply to become a member because we are selective about who we work with.
My next big mistake was underpricing my services.
Chris Do shared in a conversation with me, which I'll link to in the description below that he charges $30,000 for a one hour talk. Now, he didn't arrive at that point overnight, but he kept increasing his prices. Even though it felt uncomfortable, back when I did my MBA, they told us that pricing is a signal of value.
At the time, I thought that was rubbish. I was wrong. As Warren Buffet famously said, price is what you pay, value is what you get. The higher your prices, the higher the perceived value of your service or your product provided you then fulfill on that perceived value when the person does purchase the product.
So, by all means, increase your prices, but make sure that the resulting solution that you deliver for that price is worth way more than you charge. If you don't do that, you will hurt your brand. If you'd like to watch the full conversation I had with Chris Do, I highly recommend checking it out because he truly is a master at getting clear on pricing and teaching you how to increase your prices and work outside of your comfort zone to keep increasing your prices.
Mistake number seven, conflating revenue, profit and cash flow. I, for one, am tired of hearing the bro marketers talking about how they made a million dollars here and a million dollars there, because in most instances they're talking about revenue. And to be honest with you, revenue doesn't matter a whole lot if you're not profitable and profit doesn't matter a whole lot.
If you're only profitable on paper, but you're not even cashflow positive, because if you're not making enough cash, you're not gonna be in business for very long. Like I said earlier, cashflow to your business is like oxygen for your brain. If you can't run a cashflow positive business, you will have difficulty making good decisions based in abundance and rationality.
You, you're likely to make decisions that are reactive and steeped in a poverty mindset. There was a time when my business was profitable on paper, but I didn't have enough cash to pay my bills. I hope you don't make the same mistake I did. Watch your cashflow carefully. Treat it with respect because if you don't have cashflow, you don't have a business.
So we are back in the studio now, and if you found this video useful, you definitely wanna check out this playlist we've created, especially for you. Which talks about other business mistakes I've made over the years and helps you avoid these mistakes with actionable strategies that actually work.
Be sure to click somewhere around here on the link to the playlist.
We'll also link to the playlist in the description below. Do me a favor and hit the like button so YouTube knows this is worth sharing with others who might benefit from it.
And hey, if you are building a business. And you want more of this kind of stuff, real talk, real strategies that actually work, then head over to productive insights.com/subscribe and grab your free nine-day email course.
The email course will help you to build your business using a structured approach I've used in my membership community for years now. It's all geared towards helping you to work smarter and not harder, and not make the same mistakes I've made.
Drop a comment below and let me know. Which part of this video hit the hardest or just even say hello.
I'd love to hear from you. Thanks for watching, and I'll catch you in the next one.
Ciao for now.
