A Planned Approach is the Key to Startup Survival

An entrepreneur’s deliberate desire to develop, test, and revise their plans are what makes the business successful over time.

A good many entrepreneurial ventures are born on a napkin, built on sand, and grown through a series of flips and flops that would make even the most seasoned stunt pilot nauseous. It should not surprise then that longitudinal studies show that a little over 20% of new startups fail within the first year; the startup survival rate falls to roughly one-half around their fifth anniversary (Bureau of Labor Statistics Staff, 2016). Thinking more broadly and implementing effective organization design principles (i.e., people, planning, processes, procedures) may be the key to the building, scaling, and sustaining a startup long-term.

Some researchers suggest that the most common cause of small business failure is the lack of senior management focus on matters of strategy within the organization (Jennings & Beaver, 1995). At the most basic level, this falls to an emphasis on tactical challenges of the business, rather than broader strategic issues. For example, it is firing a salesperson who did not achieve the stated sales goals or meeting quotas for the year, while ignoring marketplace and demographic changes that render a product…