Anyone who tells you that growing your business from nothing is a walk in the park is lying to you! You’re setting yourself up for long hours, late nights and a lot of hard work. But there are many rewards of becoming an entrepreneur…
That’s as long as, of course, you figure out how to lift your business and keep moving forward. This article will talk about how to do just that.
Get started and get lifting
One of the most important tips for entrepreneurs is just this – to get started. Before then, all you have are some neat ideas for how your business could work. You need to get started and get trading to find out how it actually does work.
In many ways, this highly motivated attitude – that it’s so easy to summon when you first start – should be the one that you train yourself to maintain throughout your business’s life. It’s no good having a bright idea for a new service, product or feature and it staying on paper until there’s no value in it anymore.
You need to get it out there and test it.
This is not to say that you should launch a new service without a whole lot of data and market research backing it up. But without getting started, you’ll never really know.
Test, test and test some more
Getting an idea out there is just the start. Now you need to test it. Then test it again. Iterate. Then test it some more. This is how you’re going to make sure that you’re moving your business in the right direction.
Whether this is a new marketing channel you’re thinking of investing in or a new service you’re rolling out, you need to know that you’re getting your money’s worth from it. It’s no good just throwing your marketing spend down the drain without realising it, for example.
The only way to do this is to designate some smart and relevant metrics for the goals you want to achieve. Then test your progress against them to make sure you’re doing as well (or as poorly) as you think you’re doing.
You’re doing this to help yourself recognise times when you can reinforce success and times when you shouldn’t be reinforcing failure. Don’t get held back by feeling you’ve invested too much time or money in a project. Be ruthless. Throwing good money after the bad you’ve already spent or wasted is never going to get you that initial investment back.
It’s called the sunk cost fallacy for a reason.
~Business Game Changer Special Promotion~
Proper people prevent poor performance
The actual phrase is “proper planning prevents poor performance”, but I like this one better.
Because perhaps the one overriding factor governing your company’s success and how well it’s going to keep moving forward is not how ingenious your products are or how cool your logo is. Instead, it’s the kind of team you hire.
Do you want a member of staff…
- Who turns up on time and does their job
- Who goes through the motions until it’s time to go home at the end of the day
Or, do you want a team which…
- Is fully engaged with their work because they’re happy and feel their voice is listened to
- Works together towards the goal of making the company better
- Wants to help you innovate and improve the services you offer
One is an average employee who does the work. The other is a team member who’s going to help you get through tough times and grow your company alongside you.
You’ll want to build a strong company culture that gives your team the support they need so that they can keep on being the experts you hired them to be.
The most important entrepreneur tip: you’ve stumbled – get back up
This is the thing that holds many businesses back:
When you hit a bump in the road, you need to be ready to roll with it. To take the hit and keep moving forward.
Because unless you’re some sort of genius, you are going to make mistakes and accidents are going to happen. In all likelihood, they aren’t going to be the kind of accidents which spell the end of your company as an entity, but they’re going to be the sort of little problems which make that week a hard week or that month a hard month.
By getting started and being proactive, by testing, iterating and testing again, by hiring the right team and making them happy, you can set yourself up for success. But you always need to be prepared to lift your business back up and keep moving forward to overcome failure.
Rune Sovndahl (Fantastic Services CEO)
