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Does this sound like you? You're an entrepreneur with a small business that is chugging along and growing nicely, with $50,000 to $150,000 in annual sales but with the potential to do a lot more. You're doing most of the operations of the business yourself, (sales, marketing, accounts receivable) even if you have one or two people as full- or part-time staff. You have a lot of ideas on where to take the business next, and you act on lots of your ideas -- before completing the last initiative you began. Frustrating, isn't it?
Key Success Factors to Make Your Small Business Big
There are certain characteristics and actions that have been common to entrepreneurs who started small and built successful business empires.
1. Set Goals - Setting goals and having these goals constantly at the back of your mind is critical for big success. Bill Gates started with an audacious goal of a computer on every desktop, and today, almost 30 years later, he still speaks about it – and has been fairly successful in achieving it as well. Many successful businessmen have mentioned how writing down on paper their goals and methods to reach those goals helped them significantly. Doing so could help you as well. Some links on Goal Setting – How to Set a Goal from Mind Tools (more for operational goal setting), an article on personal goal setting from Top Achievement, myGoals – a useful site that assists in goal setting and goals achievement, Goal Setting Guide from Time Thoughts
2. Monitor Progress and Implement Improvements Fast – What you cannot measure, you cannot control. Continuously monitor the key aspects of your business that are needed for success. Analyse the data you receive from such monitoring, and continuously implement any small improvements that are required to improve results. Make sure you check out whether the new ideas / corrections you implemented a month earlier resulted in expected improvements. In the context of a small business owner, business monitoring would involve determining the key success factors for making the business a success and monitoring each of these factors on a continuous basis.
3. Be Organized & Disciplined - A lot of productive time is lost to lack of organization. If you are not currently organized, not to worry, because being organized is a habit that can be learnt. Spend some time setting up a proper system for your transactions. Such systems alone can provide you with a sustainable framework for growth. When asked in an interview what he felt was more important for business success (and his success), brains or hard work, Bill Gates replied that it was hard work and discipline. He continued saying that, while sheer brains could be the most important thing in an academic setting or a game of intellect like chess, in a business world setting, what really is important is hard work and discipline that sustains the hard work. The difference between a talented entrepreneur and a successful talented entrepreneur is often the amount of discipline and organization that the successful entrepreneur brings to this business.
4. Constantly Develop Yourself – A number of successful businessmen became successful by constant learning – be it through reading books, attending seminars, browsing the Net or by simply talking to friends and colleagues. Make sure you constantly are aware that every area of your being has scope for improvement – especially on the knowledge and personality frontier. Today, you have a number of interesting and useful blogs as well that can provide you not only with information and knowledge, but also different perspectives on any issue. See a list of useful blogs that discuss business trends and opportunities at the How can I make a million dollars quickly? section of BillDoll
5. Pay Attention to Detail – You will be surprised how many successful businesses started off because their founders saw something no one else saw, even though every one else had the same information. Put another way, seeing is not understanding. Understanding happens when you pay attention to details. Google’s founders came up with a superior search methodology when they realized that they could use the citations methodology used in research domains to assess the popularity of a research paper – that is, the more a research paper is cited by other papers, the more popular it is. Google’s founders used it as the founding principle of their popular PageRank system – the more a site gets links from other sites, the more popular it is. Every computer science researcher worth his salt knew about the citations methodology, but only Larry Page & Sergey Brin, realized its true power when applied to the world of search engines.
6. Use Your Time Productively & Use the Right Tools – It needs no repetition that time is one of the key non-renewable assets humans have – if you have lost a second, there is no way you can get that second back. What you can do is arrange your activities to get the most out the available fixed time. Automate what can be automated. Use human brains for the work that requires such brains. You will be amazed at the speed at which things get done. See some personal and business productivity tools listed later in this section.
7. Be Patient – If you are sure about your goal and your methodology to achieve it, be patient until you reach there. Make sure you monitor progress, but let not temporary dips in performance make you lose focus. Let these temporary setbacks or failures propel you to fine tune your methods. Few, if any, business empires were built overnight. It took Wal Mart, just a mom and pop shop when it started, decades to reach where it has reached today. Sam Walton believed in his fundamental understanding of the retail, and persisted with his efforts.
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