For 12 years I’ve had the dubious honour of being present at ground zero for epic business successes, and equally noteworthy business flops.

I am a creative director, strategist, and marketing agency owner. Feel free to dispute my creativity or strategic thinking, but the Malta Registry of Companies will verify that I am at the very least a marketing agency owner.

This means that I’m there when businesses launch to market, release new products, or reinvent themselves. And what I have seen time and time again is that business ventures are extremely fragile and prone to failure for a handful of familiar reasons.

Here are those reasons, as I see them.

1. First of all, the skill-set needed to run a successful business isn’t naturally inbuilt into anyone.

Just like no-one is born a tennis player or a doctor, neither is anyone born an entrepreneur. Yet, many new businesses are started by first timers who have never so much as managed a department within a business.

These are people who have inherited or earned enough money to be able to fund a new venture. If you’re starting out with inexperience, you must tread carefully.

To be successful without years of hands-on experience, you must be humble and build towards your goal slowly. Surround yourself with proven, experienced managers, and listen to them carefully.

2. The second thing that can hurt a business is a lack of priorities.

All too often I’ve seen business founders spend months haggling over the finer points of their brand vision, when in reality their business was suffering from much more urgent problems, such as whole departments of staff resigning en masse due to poor work culture.

This is the corporate equivalent of playing the fiddle while Rome burns. In challenging times fight the fire closest to you.

There are many serious problems in your business, and there always will be. Some are close, and some are far. Deal with them in that order of priority, because it’s no good fixing the roof while the foundations of your business crumble.

To avoid this, periodically list the issues you need to tackle, rank them in order of urgency, and work your way down that list going one by one. The more you divide your attention, the fewer problems you solve overall.

3. And last but certainly not least, most businesses do not really talk to their customers and ask them what they actually want.

To any business owner reading this, I ask, when’s the last time you sat down with a sample of your prospective clients and asked them to tell you what they like and dislike about your company? Or what you would have to do to win their business?

I’ll let you in on a little secret – they’re dying to tell you.

When my agency organises customer research, we find that both individuals and organisations are more than happy to be candidly interviewed about what they actually want. So, if people are willing to tell you exactly how to sell to them, you should listen.

Bonus: So those are in my view three of the biggest business killers in Malta, but I’d like to finish with one thing that gives many Maltese entrepreneurs an edge.

That thing is the bullish grit and determination to get up, and try again.

Nothing is more important. In business, success is the ability to take the punches, survive, and move forward with another attempt. No shame, no humiliation, no looking back. Like salmon swimming upstream, the long term winners in business are simply the persistent survivors.

Talent will take you so far, but resilience is required to get to the top. Most people don’t have the appetite for the demands of running a business, but if you do, persistence will pay off over time.

Work hard, be realistic, accept guidance, turn failure into wisdom, and eventually you will be rewarded.

Beppe Coleiro is the co-founder of creative and strategic branding agency Blonde and Giant, specialising in working with startups and venture capital funds to raise investment and develop the world’s most innovative companies. To date Blonde and Giant has facilitated over €1bn in fundraising for startups in Europe and North America.