How Entrepreneurs Waste Money

Although not a huge investment, one of the biggest money wasters for me was taking out 2 ads in a magazine for $600 each plus the cost of ad design. As far as I could tell I didn’t receive any orders from the ads. Only placing them twice wasn’t enough exposure. After that, I went back to bootstrapping and navigating better ways to get the word out, figuring that my time billed at $75 per hour would get me a lot more juice. And it certainly has. For me, the organic way works best.

I hired a web designer who promised to build me a great sales site. While it looked good, and set me back about $1,200, I didn't see the results I was looking for and my site didn't convert traffic to customers. Understand that many web designers are just that, designers, not sales people. Make sure they have a background in designing sales sites and understand what converts visitors to paying customers. A fancy, flashy site does not mean more customers.

We spent around $1000.00 to do a press release via fax (through a very reputable company). We received no responses at all. It was a total waste of money.

A couple of years ago I was working on a start up with several business partners. We were in need of a website for our budding company and wanted something impressive. We signed up with a company that was going to do our website, some graphic design and help with marketing for $10,000. The site went over due by nearly 2 months and although the end site was good I have since learned that you can have a great website done for under $1,000 by hiring, most likely, the same outsourcers they did.

I sell unusually sized products so I needed to custom order boxes for shipping. I wanted to be prepared for huge orders for our large products. Instead of spending a little more money and getting a sample, I just ordered 250 boxes. When the boxes came I realized they are not large enough, I didn't account for the bubble wrap, and the cardboard was too thin. Now we need to cut the boxes and layer them. It is a lot more work and more expensive.

I was given a broken, used, commercial grade copy machine, thinking I could spend a couple bucks fixing it up and it'd work as good as new. Unfortunately, the minute one thing was fixed another would break. Long story short, I've spent so much $%^&*!% money repairing the copier (that still doesn't work right) that I could've taken that money and instead bought a brand new, state-of-the-art machine. Moral of the story: if it has a power button, buy it new!

I speak and write to 2 groups of people, homeschoolers for science, and businesses for employee brain optimization and training. I taught classes at an expo in exchange for a booth. I used $400 for giveaways. The vendors had huge displays that overwhelmed my space. I had to chase people down to give them stuff. I signed up 20 to my newsletter of 8000. I had sales of about $200 making it a loss. Unless you've got several thousand, skip the expo. I make more in one day doing social media marketing

The biggest waste of money I spent was hiring a PR firm when we were first launching our website. This PR firm was on a retainer of $1,500 per month and lasted for 3-4 months. If you are starting a company, you have to learn how to be scrappy, and this also applies to generating press. In my belief, no one is as passionate as you are about your company, which means you need to be pitching, period. You cant outsource this type of work, especially at the beginning stages of your company.

I purchased a wireless printer to make my job easier, but the printer doesn't recognize my Wi-Fi signal. I called the vendor and they had me uninstall/reinstall everything. After several failed attempts, and calls more and more calls, nothing fixed the problem. This went on for hours before I finally decided that I'd rather deal with a wireless-less printer than waste anymore time and money listening to a vendor who couldn't make their product work. Avoid wireless printers!!!

The ROI and tracking ability of online marketing is second to none. The biggest waste of money for our firm was when we purchased 2 billboards and some radio ads near a military base, approximately $40,000 in spending.

We've built our mortgage bank completely through online sales to nearly $40 million in revenue. After awhile, I felt obligated to try something offline.

What I learned was to stick with what works, and just do more of it. I wish I had that $40K back to put it online.

I purchased an operating chocolate shop & we were spending thousands of dollars on fancy labels for our handcrafted chocolates. Every new idea needed seemed to require an expensive label. I immediately revamped the label program and we started using the printer across the street to make full-color stickers rather than send out for fancy labels. Costs were reduced by about 90% and chocolate sales are up. Packaging is important, but if profits aren't affected it's well worth the change.