What is the difference between the businesses that succeed and the ones that don’t? Quite simply - customers. They’re the lifeblood of any business and without them no company can survive.

Finding customers is key to running a successful business and all highly successful firms are good at marketing. This doesn’t mean that you need to spend thousands on an expensive marketing campaign. There is a tremendous amount of money wasted on advertising and it's frustrating when you find the return on investment (ROI) is non-existent. However, there are so many ways to avoid these costly mistakes and there are marketing strategies that are available at a fraction of the cost.

By Michael Gerber

Most businesses fail. Eight out of ten often in the first five years.

Most small business owners have little or no sense of demographics, finances, advertising, franchising or, managing. Mostly they have no purpose, no ideas and no image.

"In fact, most small businesses aren't really businesses at all, they're jobs," says author, Michael Gerber.

"Most have built a business around their own personal willingness to work, their own personal technical skills, for all the wrong reasons.

"Rather than building a business that works, they have built a job that works. At this point, a powerful question to ask would be: How do I invent a business that works apart from me, rather than because of me?"

"I'm essentially saying that most small business owners don't make it and, even if they do, it's not that grand of an experience. Rather than being entrepreneurs they are technicians suffering from entrepreneurial seizures."

"Most people who go into business for themselves are motivated not by a desire to own a business but by a desire not to have a boss. Their business is not really a business, it's a job."

"A business is a real business only when it's owner has one goal in mind: The sole purpose for creating a business is to sell it. Every day I come into my business, I'm buying it: What's the value of my business?

If you're not holding the business to the same standards that a stranger would you’re really in trouble."

By Michael E. Gerber

"Almost everyone who starts their own enterprise will end up as an exhausted failure rather than a successful developer of their own private money machine," says business visionary Michael Gerber who also says most people who go into business for themselves have been "suddenly stricken by an entrepreneurial seizure".

Typical of his would-be entrepreneurs are the laid-off manager who decides to set up a consultancy, the labourer who quits to become a contractor, or the cook who opens a pie shop or restaurant. Their dreams of independence and wealth usually end in an awakening that their business is going nowhere as it grinds the life out of them.

In the United States, more than a million people launch new businesses each year. Within 12 months, 40% of the businesses will have sunk, within five years, 80% will be gone. Worse still, in the following five years, 80% of the survivors will go under. (Similar statistics are reported in Australia.)

Gerber says that one of the main reasons for failure is the assumption that someone who understands the technical work of a business will understand a business that does that technical work. Does a solicitor know how to market a suburban legal service? Does a hamburger flipper know what the customers want in food service?

The answer is usually no. Gerber writes: "Rather than being their greatest single asset, knowing the technical work of their business becomes their greatest single liability." Many of these technicians end up creating a job they can never leave nor look beyond. They work in their business, not on it.