Are You Killing Your Company? Businesses fail for lots of reasons. Sometimes, the reason is you. Find out how you could be killing your own company--and how to stop.

Businesses perish in untimely ways, many of which are largely out of an entrepreneur's control: There's too much competition. The public is no longer interested in your product or service. You're a victim of bad luck--you opened a business on the Gulf Coast a few weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit. Maybe a trusted employee has been cooking the books, or a family crisis is dragging you down.

But sometimes, the painful reality is that a business falls apart for one reason: you. In the end, when any company is suffering, there is a question every entrepreneur must ask when he or she looks in the mirror: Am I killing my own business?

We asked a number of experts for their thoughts on how we most commonly shoot ourselves in the foot. Although there are probably 500 or more methods to murder a multinational or strangle an S corporation in the dead of night, we agree that there are five ways it's most likely to happen.