It is great to be inspired and to want to start a business of your own but quite often, a new business will fail to gain enough customers, quickly enough, who are willing to pay market rates for a product or a service. When that happens, the business will close.

Running a business is often an extension of the founder's creativity. A talented clothing designer or a gifted artist, will open a retail store to sell their own products. Confidence and motivation are often not as important as business acumen. Maybe, most entrepreneurs would be better served by getting some business training before opening their online or "bricks and mortar" shop.

If an entrepreneur who will go on to lose their business, had taken an online business management course or attended a tertiary institution, they might have been able to see and work around some or all of the things that they did not know that they did not know, that led to the failure.

Preparation is vital before establishing any business venture.

When a business fails, the consequences are like ripples on a pond. Loans are not repaid and so credit ratings suffer. Stock is not paid for in full and business relationships between suppliers and retailers break forever. Personal relationships also suffer when a business run by a partnership, is forced to close.

On a positive note, business people often succeed.

Those that do, have taken the time to prepare themselves for the rigours of self employment by working in a similar business and concurrently, taking a business course at an accredited business training institution.

Back to the clothing designer and the gifted artist. They may well be highly talented and their goods may be in strong demand but there is an organisation to create before they can reach customers on their own. They may well be better off selling their goods to an established retail chain and let it handle the marketing while they design and produce the goods. Options like that are the sort of issues that come up in online business training courses. Getting training enables entrepreneurs to foresee the events, issues and roadblocks that other business people have encountered since trading began centuries, indeed thousands or years ago.

Training enables business operators to learn from the mistakes of others rather than repeat them.