OCR Text |
Show j ! Reasons of Business Success, j ! When one man grows . wealthy or i . tehieves an independence in business, ', 't is a common saying that a hundred f fill. The great successes are known ! because their name is legion. Brad- street's enter into an examination of the causes of business failures. The main things needed for success, it says, are credit, capital and business ability, abil-ity, to which may be added oppor-' tunity. '.and . luck in its broad meaning. mean-ing. . There were, according to Brad-street's Brad-street's investigation, 1,205,S62 concerns doing business in the United States . last year, and of this number 10,648, or 0.88 per cent, failed. It was greater than either of the two preceding years, but back of 1S99 no percentage of number num-ber failing so small can be found earli-. earli-. er. than 1S82. In tracing the causes of failures in 1901 the great number are, of course, laid to faults of those who failed. Eleven specific causes are assigned. Of the 10,648, 3,223 failed from lack of cap-, ital, 2,623 from incompetency, 1,154 because be-cause of fraud, 826 by inexperience. .Summed, up briefly, the "three great causes of, business failures attributable to the trader himself were laclc of capital, cap-ital, incompetency and inexperience, in the order named; the three accounting for 57.1 per cent of all failures, as against 61 per cent in 1900, while specific spe-cific conditions and undue competition, not attributable' to the trader himself, accounted for 27.3 per cent of all the disasters. "Specific conditions" cover exceptional, and unlooked-for circumstances, circum-stances, such as the steel strike, the corn crop failure, the lower price of cotton at the south. These specific conditions con-ditions are credited with 1,755 failures last year. This is one-sixth of the whole number. The most important thing to have in business, according to Bradstreet's, is good credit. Only 0.9 of 1 per cent of those who failed were' rated in very good credit, and similar statistic for previous yaars "would seem to absolutely abso-lutely fix and confirm the statement that in normal years, or in years of prosperity, good credit is the one most important asset, without which all success is vain.'" Lack of capital is a great cause of nearly one-third of the 10,000 failures, with its corollary in the effort to do too large a business upon the capital employed. |