Whether you are managing a running business or planning to start a new one in the Egyptian market; you need to know why more than 80% of the Egyptian businesses didn’t last to see its 37th month nowadays.
Here are some of the main reasons for business failure in Egypt
1-Macroeconomics factors
-
2008 global financial crisis:
The Egyptian economy couldn’t avoid the 2008 “housing bubble” and its destructive strike for the global economics. - 2011, 25th January revolution:
After less than 4 years from the “2008 financial crisis”, Egypt faced another instability in all of its macroenvironment factors, due to 25th of January revolution, and still fighting for financial recovery till today.
2- Bad management
- Weak strategic management
Strategic management is a science usually taught in postgraduate education, and despite that, we could found thousands of top managers didn’t hold any master degrees or even try studying strategic management even in an online course. - Weak financial management
(Neglecting numerical KPIs)
“You can not manage what you can not measure”, Peter Drucker said. Can we evaluate business without numerical KPIs?
Sure we can’t. the majority of businesses in Egypt nowadays thought that sales, revenues, expenses and net profit are the only numerical KPIs to measure business performance, and neglecting a lot of another essential KPIs. - Weak human resources management
Recruiting and payroll is not the only function of the human resources department, there is a lot of neglected and essential functions like organizational development, talent acquisition etc… since we passed on the 1st industrial revolution two centuries ago most of the businesses should change to the human-centric organization - No SMART goals
Good managers can’t depend on employees ownership and accountability only in businesses, despite that, a lot of managers didn’t apply SMART goals in every single task.
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound - Marketing misunderstanding.
Defining marketing as if “it’s any selling, advertising or promotional activity” should be a crime, because according to the most known definitions of marketing mix it should control the main 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), and that means that marketing management is responsible for controlling the DNA of any business.
*Marketing mix could also include several other Ps like Physical evidence, Process, People.
3- The social media marketers myth
Facing financial problems for too many years under bad management supervision like the discussed above sure will distort the business markets and minimizing its standards to reach bellow any accepted ones.
-
Business immaturity
On companies level:
Unfortunately, the majority of business decision makers, start believing that’s reducing expenses is the ONLY-Way to survive in the tough markets nowadays and increase their profits, so they start to invest in short returns activities like (sales activities, continuous promotional offers, facebook leads generation… etc.) and shut down any long-term returns activities like branding projects, public relations, brand positioning, on ground activations or customer loyalty programs.
On candidates level:
The above circumstances developed a new time-bomb, it’s the “Social media marketer”, Because of business immaturity, thousands of people start shifting their career to social media marketing field and also some of them quit their full-time jobs and heading to “Freelancing jobs”. Wondering why?
Digital marketing science is a trend, it’s been developed after almost 100 years from knowing the Marketing as a science, until today few Egyptian universities teach digital marketing, so theoretically, academic education is not needed to work in digital marketing in Egypt, but actually, digital marketing is a small part of the marketing so it’s a must for digital marketers to have a concrete marketing background.
Despite the spread of not qualified marketers (Social media marketers), in addition of the cost reduction strategy have been hit the Egyptian markets, this myth will be a good choice to grow and take a larger part in companies failure.