Startups vs failures

Startupr was incorporated in 2011 which is already 7 years ago. We help to start 400 – 600 companies every year. So if you take the average, we help to start around 500 new companies every year. We recently did some calculations and found out that most of the companies are basically not renewing due to their failures. This is quite common for startups. I befriended a few of our clients and became aware of how the business some of them don’t go as planned. This is quite normal; not everyone can become a successful entrepreneur.

From our statistics in Startupr:

• 1st year since incorporation 50% failure
• 2nd year since incorporation 75% failure
• 3rd year 80% failure
• 4th year is 90% failure
• 5th year is the “I made it year” 10% of business survive

I have also looked at the current situation in Incparadise and have found out that the statistics are a little better by 5-10% in every category. This is just a real-life situation.

As I have mentioned earlier, I know a few clients, so I know there are many reasons. I have been raised in Europe in a business family, and grew up in Hong Kong, became an entrepreneur and I am now running businesses in the US, Hong Kong, and Europe. I can say that the characteristic of failures is always the same. I think that most of the failures are caused by lack of founders’ hard work and enthusiasm. I know that you would think that everyone works hard, I agree however that there is hard work and really hard work. Every entrepreneur insists that they work very hard, however, some of them don’t really know what it means to dig in and get things done.

Another issue is luck. I know that luck is very difficult to measure that, but I can see the same smart people get hugely successful, and other people end up just mediocre. Why is that? Well, again it is sometimes very hard to explain but you really need to have the gift, or we can call it luck, to succeed. I am sure that success might be 70% of hard work but you also need luck which can be 30% of the overall picture.