Shawn seems to be very active lately in providing check-up lists with great advice for bootstrapped entrepreneurs. And I feel that I'm kind of behind schedule in my guest poster "Job" here at bootstrapme.com.

By the way, "bootstrap" is a complicated term for a non-native English speaker like me and when Shawn approached me last year for an interview about my business, I had to search the Internet to find out what a "bootstrap company" really is. It turned out that the company I have founded and am now running with my 2 partners really is a bootstrapped company (and if this doesn't necessarily make me an expert, I can surely say: Oh...that happened to me too!).

Shawn wrote about the Six suggestions for bootstrap success . I've now decided to write about the 7 deadly sins for a bootstrapped company. Why 7? Because 7 is my lucky number and because I just need to create the impression that I work more than Shawn on the articles :) to compensate for my lack of recent writing.

I think any small business start-up faces from time to time near death experiences (I still do that every 3 months when I have to pay the taxes :) . But these experiences are much more painful when you are a bootstrapped company: Wikipedia says "Financial bootstrapping is a term used to cover different methods for avoiding using the financial resources of external investors." That means that the company receives no external funding and should live from the resources it generates.

Chances are that the regular near death experiences are generated by one of these absolute sins:

1. Charging too little or lack of focus on what is bringing real money. Bootstrapped companies start small. This is the source of an essential frustration for the owner/founder and lack of confidence which ultimately leads to charging too little for the services/products that you provide. If money is scarce, you will find yourself doing things that you are not really good at, or that don't bring any real money. You charge too little today, you charge too little tomorrow and suddenly you find yourself at the end of the month with no money to pay the bills.

2. Making expenses you shouldn't be making. We are taught by the society to spend money. We have the urge to buy that piece of software we shouldn't (yet) be buying, or to take that expensive presidential chair for our (home) office just to show to (our family) who is the "boss". If it doesn't make work more efficient in the long term or bring more customers and money, well, you shouldn't buy it (yet). I think there is a saying: if you buy a Mercedes in your first year of running the business, that's a sure sign you will go down eventually.

3. Lack of commitment from the founders/early employees. Entrepreneurs do get tired. They are simple people, with their own resources, expectations and moods. If one way or another the founder grows tired of making the business run, or even the early employees are not efficient enough, then who is going to push the company forward? Sure, if you are big enough, you have your sales manager, your financial analyst, the technical guys and everybody that could make a business work even if you, the founder, feel like playing golf now, or...ah... the entire year. But bootstrapped companies are started solely on the founder's efforts and work. When they stop, the business will stop.

4. Ignore up-coming expenses and available resources. That's a subset of things that might go wrong at point 2, but not about making the wrong expenses. It's about wrongly assessing financial flows: let's suppose you have to pay one of your suppliers in 10 days, but you are getting paid in 30 days. For a non-bootstrapped company, it might not be a problem, but that's not the case here, right?

5. Missing plans for the future or for the worse case scenario. Let's say you started something and it works. It brings you just enough money to keep you happy, committed and ready to work. You go day by day at the (home) office and just do the work. This will get you to a nice and fuzzy security feeling that everything goes as it should. The wake up call will be... a call from your main customer leaving you :( You have to plan, and even put the plans on paper.

6. Ignoring compliance with legal regulations. Remember you are small? Maybe too small to follow the rules? Well, you know the saying: you can't escape death and taxes. And law. Of course you might not know all the regulations or don't have time or money to keep everything in good order. But that's not an excuse and really the problem isn't that you don't know, have time or money. It's somewhere else. It's where you didn't make adequate plans for the future.

7. Mixing personal with business finances. I'm adding this though I already wrote about it :) Well, if you go bananas, the worse thing that might happen is having a greater loss than there already is.

Oh...one more thing. I did all the seven sins so far and even more! I just hope you might get the chance to avoid them at least partially.

(Editor's Note: Guest poster Cristian Dorobantescu is a Bucharest-based entrepreneur and the founder of EnergyByte, In Progress and Entrepreneur Interviews. He also maintains the Small Business Entrepreneur Blog)