Factors that determine whether a business succeeds or fails

During the last two decades, small and new businesses have created two of every three new jobs in the United States. According to the National Economic Council, small businesses employ 60 million Americans - or half of all jobs in the country.

The numbers are impressive and the success stories are many, but even long hours of hard work and steadfast dedication don't guarantee success. In fact, more than half of small businesses fail within the first five years, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

What makes the difference between success and failure? several fundamental factors...determine whether a business succeeds or fails

1. Experience
2. A plan
3. Money
4. Strong credit
5. Outside income
6. Bench strength
7. Strong financial controls
8. Friends. The business owner needs a lot of support
9. Energy. 
10. A good team
11. A realistic perception of success

The best part of starting a new business is that there are a number of resources to help with the process, including a personal banker. Remember, they've been there before and have helped many other businesses get off to a successful start.


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11 ways to quit your job and be more successful

Now, more than ever, you need to be entrepreneurial to be successful; you need to create a job to keep a job," says Gerber.

"When you work for someone else you're putting all your eggs into one basket. If you want to secure your financial future regardless of the bad economy, you need to be in control of your own life," he insists.

Ready to take a stab at entrepreneurship?

Here are 11 ways to never get a "real" job >>

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/11-ways-to-quit-your-job-and-be-more-successful-2012-6#ixzz1xT8oGcIc

Difficulties of starting a business in Africa

According to the World Bank, African nations make it harder for entrepreneurs to succeed than other parts of the world, so why is it so difficult to start a business in Africa?

For example if you want to start a business in Mozambique, it takes 153 days to register a business, with a total of 14 separate steps.

But it isn't always so long-winded. Rwanda was singled out as among the biggest reformers in the past year.

Are you trying to start a business? What problems are you currently facing? How do you maintain a successful business? Is it more difficult if you are a woman?click to view comments of business people in Africa

A mechanism that could address structural unemployment problem

It’s impossible to know precisely how much unemployment is structural and how much is cyclical, and probably there’s some of both right now. Cyclical unemployment resulting from weak demand is amenable to expansionary government spending or monetary policy. Structural unemployment is harder to fix. Structural joblessness results from things like skills mismatches, and policy to address such mismatches is inherently longer-term in scope, involving education and encouraging innovation. Expansionary policy can't reduce structural unemployment; when that's all that's left, more expansion generates nothing but rising inflation.
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careergong.com is more than a policy, but a mechanism that could address structural unemployment problem in the world presently 

50M fewer jobs worldwide since '08 due to structural Unemployment

The bleak worldwide employment picture is worsening and is, in some ways, irreversible, according to a United Nations agency report of global unemployment.

"This is not a normal employment slowdown," said the World of Work Report 2012, an annual survey of the global job market. "Four years into the global crisis, labour market imbalances are becoming more structural, and therefore more difficult to eradicate.....This means that they would be unable to obtain new employment even if there were a strong recovery."......

The report, released Monday by the International Labor Organization, based in Geneva, said there are 50 million fewer jobs worldwide than at the start of the economic meltdown in 2008.

.....Pearl Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association...said..."There's a structural mismatch of the skill sets of the unemployed and the industries with emerging jobs,...This crisis has been transformational," ...it is different from previous job deficits because, in past recessions, people became unemployed only temporarily because the jobs returned. "Many of the jobs lost are not coming back. The ones that are being created are in technology-intensive industries."

Read full article here....

Africa's skills gap

Elaborating further he added that “The summary comparative analysis released this week illustrates that in virtually every key sector of the economy and society, most African countries are operating at between 25 percent to 75 percent of the required human resources capacity. In the health sector for instance giving Nigeria as an example, Nigeria has only about 25 percent of the doctors it needs for a population of over 150 million people, about 45 percent of nurses and midwives, and about 12 percent of pharmacists.

Compared to countries of broadly equivalent population, Nigeria has only 55,376 doctors compared to 264,515 in Japan with a population of 127.1 million and 614,183 doctors in Russia with a population of 140.8 million.

In other words all other factors given, Nigeria requires an additional number of a minimum 240,000 doctors to attain similar health access as Japan.

For nurses and midwives, Nigeria has roughly 224,943 compared to 531,210 in Japan and 1.2 million in Russia: and for pharmacists the numbers are 18,682 in Nigeria compared to 174,890 in Japan.

Read full article here.......

maintaining structural unemployment is a balancing act

If a certain skill is scarce (supply is low) but much needed by employers (high demand), a worker with those skills has ample bargaining power as regards his/her wage. If there is a surplus of a certain skill (high
supply), which is not much in demand by employers, workers with those skills will have less
bargaining power and may experience unemployment.
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/actemp/downloads/projects/youth/tackling_ye_guide_en.pdf, page 21

However it is better that everyone is skilled enough for their respective fields than there be a scarcity of labour in the labour market.