What makes one business fail and another succeed?

It’s a question that serial entrepreneurs have always pondered. And if we knew the answer then we’d all be working for ourselves and succeeding like crazy.

The fact is, it’s hard to come up with ideas for businesses, and then even more difficult to do all the research and due diligence and then to write a business plan.

Don’t think you need a plan? Figure you can wing it, fly by the seat of your pants, so to speak? Tell your prospective lender that your plan your plan doesn’t exist outside your fertile brain and you’ll be laughed out of the bank.

So what makes a successful business?

It’s attention to detail, the little things, that can make or break a business. Customer service, certainly. A quality product or service, no doubt. All those little things that add up to a big thing—success. And like the old saw about there being a fine line between the neighborhood bully becoming a cop or a crook, so too is there that fine line between making it, or failing.

It’s also the drive, even the compulsion, that the owner brings to it. It’s his baby, her idea, theirs to succeed or fail...and failure is not an option that you consider when starting up or you will then surely have failed before you even have started.

Yet failure may come, and if and when it does you still have to be smart enough to learn what you did wrong, what you did right, and—the mark of a true entrepreneur: learn what you did wrong and don’t repeat it the second time around.

Nonetheless, the will to succeed is hardly enough. Bottom line is that you have to be marketing a product or service that people not only want but need as well. And if they don’t need it, or don’t think they need it, then you have to convince them that they do.

That, in essence, is how some of the fads have become successful. And maybe you don’t want to have too many of whatever you’re selling. If long-ago memory from childhood is correct, there was for a brief time a “run” on Hula Hoops and people couldn’t always get them at every store. Supply and demand works every time. A shortage, real or not (see gasoline demand for examples) begets greater demand which begets greater (i.e., more lucrative) sales which in turn spurs demand. And endless cycle, or circle, just like Hula Hoops.

So why, or how, does someone come up with a seemingly squirrelly idea, like the Hula Hoop, and find that it sells? It did, like crazy, back in the 1950s, and it made its inventor and manufacturer quite wealthy. Of course, it was a fad—and fads fade and die and this one did as all others before and since.

But it was a fad that people latched onto, much in the way that others have shot their way to stardom and made millions for their inventors and/or manufacturers. (Rumor has it that some people still have 40 and 50-year-old hoops stashed in attics or garages.)

Of course, since those Hula Hoopin’ days in the 1950s, we’ve had pet rocks, bottled water, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch dolls and tons of other businesses, or fads, that have succeeded—sometimes fabulously so—for a short time and then fizzled. A few, like the Beanies and bottled tap water, have had remarkable staying power.

But, by and large, so many toys, trinkets, gadgets, gimmicks, whatever, that capture the public’s fancy for however long or short a time, eventually disappear, consigned to the dustbin of memories.

Remember Krispy Kremes? It’s not all that long ago that it was a nationwide sensation. People loved the warm, creamy donuts. And then, the Atkins diet and the loathing for all things carbohydrate, hit. And Krispy Kremes became just another good tasting thing that the food police said was bad for you. So now, it’s struggling to stay afloat with stock prices down beaucoup dollars from once lofty heights.

So one formula for success might mean staying afloat as best you can during the really tough times, marketing and advertising and marketing like crazy during the good times and fighting for every client or every sale.

And finally, remember that no one thing lasts forever. As Andrew “Flip” Filipowski of Divine Interventures fame told publisher Jim Elsener and me some years ago, “Companies die just like everything else does too.”

It’s good to remember that as you go through life...and work. No one, not a company, not a person, is indispensable.

Contact editor Don Kopriva at 630-428-8788 or at dkopriva@thebusinessledger.com