D'oh!Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but foresight could be, too. Here's how you can catch more business blunders before they happen.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Peter Justen is a serial entrepreneur whose most recent venture is MyBizHomepage, a Middleburg, Virginia, company that offers a free, web-based financial dashboard system and projects more than $3 million in sales this year. However, even a seasoned entrepreneur like Justen can slip up. He could have explored international opportunities before launching his company last September, but he decided to focus on the $25 million U.S. financial dashboard market instead. Fast-forward to today, when about 35 percent of MyBizHomepage's subscribers are international, logging on to check their financials from emerging entrepreneurial economies such as Estonia, Pakistan, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.
Justen, 51, admits he didn't anticipate the site's immediate and far-flung global reach. "The big 'duh' moment was the international side," he says. "I didn't see any of that coming." Luckily, the website translates into foreign currencies--"A payable is a payable," says Justen--but the company is planning to produce international-language editions of its product to meet the needs of its growing international roster.
Continue reading this article — and all of our other premium content with Entrepreneur+
Join the internet’s leading entrepreneur community! With your subscription you’ll get:
- Unlimited access, including premium content
- No ads
- Subscription to狗万官方magazine
- Four free e-books a year
- Subscriber-only events with our experts