If you do not want to succeed in business, follow these steps

So, you have started a business. Perhaps it is a service, perhaps it is a product, or perhaps you are building something in between.

Either way, congratulations. You have leaped that so many only dream about. The world could be at your feet. Of course, if you play your cards right, you can ruin it all before it even begins.

If you aim to fail miserably, I have a playbook ready. It is full of behaviours that look harmless on the surface but will quietly strangle your chances of success.

The beauty of this approach is that everything here feels like “common sense.” Which makes it very easy to follow.

Let us walk through the ten most reliable steps to sabotage your brand and marketing, and by extension, your business.

Step 1: Stay Invisible

Forget branding. Who needs a consistent identity when you have a good product or service? Your logo can be an afterthought, your website can stay half finished, and your social media presence can resemble a forgotten ghost town. People will surely stumble across your brilliance eventually.

Why this ensures failure: Invisibility is the fastest route to irrelevance. Customers rarely buy the “best” product. They buy what they recognise, remember and trust. If your business leaves no impression, it may as well not exist.

Reality check: Visibility is not vanity. It is about reach, recall and resonance. A clear identity, from colours and fonts to tone and values, places your business firmly in the mind of your audience. Without it, you remain background noise.

Step 2: Refuse to Define Your Audience

Here is another masterstroke for failure: try to sell to everyone. Keep your message broad so that no one feels excluded. “We serve all kinds of people” has a nice ring to it. Unfortunately, it also makes you forgettable.

Why this ensures failure: When you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. Your marketing becomes vague wallpaper. It might be seen, but it is never compelling.

Reality check: Niche is power. The clearer you are about who you serve, the easier it is to attract them. A skincare brand that promises solutions for “women in their thirties dealing with adult acne” will always outsell “a cream for everyone with skin.” Specificity builds trust and authority.

Step 3: Treat Sales Like a Dirty Word

If you want to fail quickly, avoid selling altogether. Post feel-good content, drop a few links into your captions, and wait for people to throw money at you out of goodwill. And if someone suggests building a funnel, writing a sales page or asking for the sale directly? Laugh them out of the room. You are authentic, you do not “do” sales.

Why this ensures failure: Every thriving business has a system for sales. Without an offer, no one can buy. Without a follow-up, interest fizzles out.

Reality check: Marketing creates connection, but sales creates conversion. Refusing to sell is refusing to succeed. Selling does not cheapen your brand. Done well, it communicates confidence and clarity in your offer.

Step 4: Chase Overnight Success

Forget long-term planning. Consistency is boring. The smarter approach is to gamble on one viral post, one media feature or one lucky collaboration. When it does not happen, you can always claim the market is impossible and give up.

Why this ensures failure: Businesses are built on steady effort. One spike of attention cannot sustain a brand.

Reality check: The companies you admire did not “blow up.” They built brick by brick. Their growth looks sudden only because their years of work were invisible to you. Consistency beats one-off hype every single time.

Step 5: Work in Isolation

Never seek feedback. Never hire mentors. Never partner or collaborate. Build everything yourself from scratch. After all, you know best, and who needs other perspectives?

Why this ensures failure: Isolation kills momentum. Without feedback, you polish the wrong thing while competitors surge ahead. Without collaboration, you miss opportunities to cross-pollinate audiences.

Reality check: Strong brands grow in ecosystems. Partnerships, peer learning and outside expertise multiply growth. Working in isolation keeps you stuck in your own blind spots.

Step 6: Ignore the Numbers

Tracking metrics is dull. Forget about conversion rates, customer lifetime value or email open rates. Just go with your gut and hope it all balances out in the end.

Why this ensures failure: Guesswork is not strategy. Without data, you do not know what is working, what is wasting money, or where your next opportunity lies.

Reality check: Data gives clarity. It tells you whether your message resonates, whether your ads are leaking money, and whether your content drives real results. If you ignore it, you are navigating with your eyes shut.

Step 7: Avoid Building Authority

Do not bother with case studies, testimonials, or thought leadership. You are good at what you do, and that should be enough. People should take your word for it without proof.

Why this ensures failure: Authority is the cornerstone of trust. Without it, your business is just one of many options. People choose experts, not generalists with vague claims.

Reality check: Authority is built by showing results, teaching through content, and positioning yourself as the obvious choice. Without it, you remain invisible in a crowded market.

Step 8: Keep Everything Transactional

Do not waste time on aftercare, communities, or loyalty programmes. Customers will return if they need you. Focus all your energy on chasing new sales instead of nurturing the ones you already have.

Why this ensures failure: It costs five to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. If you do not invest in retention, you bleed profit.

Reality check: Businesses that thrive build relationships, not just transactions. They nurture communities, offer support, and make it easy for customers to keep saying yes.

Step 9: Stay Reactive, Not Strategic

Strategy is overrated. Just respond to whatever happens. Post when you feel inspired, advertise when you have spare cash, and blame the algorithm when results disappoint.

Why this ensures failure: A reactive business has no direction. You waste time chasing trends while competitors execute long-term plans.

Reality check: Strategy gives structure. It clarifies your goals, maps the customer journey, and aligns your team. Far from being restrictive, strategy creates the flexibility to pivot intelligently.

Step 10: Ignore Your Brand Story

Storytelling is fluff. Customers only care about prices, features and delivery times. Listing those clearly should be more than enough to convince them.

Why this ensures failure: Facts do not inspire loyalty. Stories do. Humans buy emotionally and justify logically. If you never tell your story, you are a commodity, not a brand.

Reality check: Your story is what separates you from competitors who look cheaper or larger. It is the human connection that makes customers root for you.

The Anti-Blueprint

If your ambition is to fail, you now have the manual. Stay invisible, serve everyone, refuse to sell, chase overnight wins, isolate yourself, ignore data, avoid authority, focus only on transactions, operate without a strategy, and bury your story.

But if your ambition is to build something lasting, flip every step on its head. Be visible, define your audience, sell with confidence, stay consistent, collaborate, measure what matters, establish authority, nurture relationships, plan with intention, and tell your story with conviction.

Marketing and branding are not accessories to a business. They are the foundation. They determine whether your product or service reaches the right people, connects with them, and convinces them to stay.

Businesses rarely fail because the product is bad. They fail because the branding is weak, the marketing is half-hearted, and the owner is waiting for luck instead of building a system.

Choose wisely.

You can follow the foolproof guide to failure, or you can take the harder but more rewarding path to success. Either way, the decision is yours.