Do you ever wonder why one or more of your competitors is doing better than you? Is their small business growing, but yours is not? You think you are doing pretty much the same things, but are you really? While they seem to be experiencing a high level of small business success, you are not.
Perhaps they are doing something you aren’t aware of. Maybe they have skills and traits different from your own. Or, maybe they got started using goals and strategies. Whatever the differences might be, they seem to have more small business success than you.
Did you take time to pre-think your small business? By that, I refer to creating a business plan that contains your vision for the business over the first 3-5 years. The plan would include who the key players will be, what their strengths and weaknesses might be, what your product/service will be. Additionally, you will think through how you will market and who your ideal audience(s) will be. Financial concepts of how you will make money and budgets for your first, third and fifth year will likely be.
Yes, some of this is guess work and estimates, but at least you give serious thought to what you need to do to build a successful small business. Are there variables involved? Of course there are. Should you build in flexibility to allow for changes of direction? Absolutely, you should. At the end of it all, you need to have a Mission and Vision. What do you hope to achieve and how will you get there? How will you achieve the small business success you desire?
You Are Beginning Your Road to Small Business Success. What Next?
Guess what? Once you define your vision of success for your company, you are still just at Square One. How can you actually get there? What will it take to achieve success for yourself, your company, your employees, customers, and suppliers? What makes successful people successful? Knowing the answers to all of these questions will improve your chances of success.
When I thought I couldn’t go on, I forced myself to keep going. My success is based on persistence, not luck. Estee Lauder
How to Find the Secrets to Your Small Business Success
There really is no one big secret to success, at least according to Richard St. John, an expert –or at least a guru – on the topic of success. It all began with a question from a fellow airline passenger on his flight to a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference. “What makes people successful?”
The question stuck in his mind. St. John wondered how he might find an answer. He ended up at the conference in the midst of a lot of very successful people. To find out, he decided that he would just ‘ask’ successful people how they did it. Sounds like a simple solution, doesn’t it?
Overall, a pretty shy guy, St. John ultimately approached 500 highly successful people, asking what they felt helped them achieve success. In the end, he found their responses fell into eight common – and simple – categories of traits. These are very basic traits, not more than one syllable in the bunch. Each is easy to understand. Anyone can adopt and use them, even you. How hard can it all be?
8 Traits Successful Small Business Owners Use
- Passion: a deep passion for the products or services offered
- Work: willingness to do whatever work is required for your business to succeed
- Focus: keep thoughts and effort focused on one thing, not going off in multiple directions
- Push: pushing yourself to reach the next level, or push away things holding you back
- Ideas: ideas to achieve small business success are important; ideas about product, employees, customers, marketing, sales, etc.
- Improve: success requires constant improvement in all concepts of a small business
- Serve: some private level of enjoyment from serving customers and solving their problems
- Persist: the stick-to-it trait to keep going when things get tough or you experience a few failures
St. John compiled the results of his interviews into a book, first published in 2009: The 8 Traits Successful People Have in Common: 8 to be Great. It is now in its 2nd edition, available in both print and Kindle formats through Amazon.com.
From St. John’s perspective, those eight basic elements are extremely important pieces of a small business (or large business) owner’s ability to achieve Success. He outlined them during a TED talk of his own, some years back and created a YouTube video that hits the high points. The video is just over six minutes in length, but well worth watching. If you don’t like some of his examples, remember that this video was created and uploaded to YouTube in 2009. Some things may have changed, but the message remains valuable.
Who Reaches Success Using These 8 Common Traits?
Success isn’t guaranteed just because you start or own a business. Small business success takes effort. It takes time. A lot of extremely successful people didn’t attend college or get an MBA or doctorate degree. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg were all college drop outs, yet they all became wildly successful in business.
Others never even finished high school, like Johnny Depp and Katie Perry. Both built successful careers in entertainment, by knowing how to sell themselves and their talents. One or more of the traits listed helped push them over the top when it came to becoming highly successful Success doesn’t require that you have a lot of money to get your small business started either. Sam Walton started out with next to nothing and look where he is today.
Everyone Hopes Small Business Success Is Quick and Easy
We are all hopeful – and anxious – to achieve success with our small businesses. We hope it will be easy and will happen quickly, but it usually doesn’t. When we hang up our shingle and open our doors for business, it is only the beginning. No one wants to fail. In reality, there really are no deep, dark, hidden secrets to achieving success. If there is an easy secret or recipe for small business success, someone would bottle it up, sell it, and make a boatload of money.
The good news is: there are some pretty simple traits and concepts that can get you there. It is up to you to decide which traits you possess that those other successful people incorporated into their day to day business processes. Review St. John’s eight common traits of successful business owners. How can you use them to make your small business successful? Which can you use to work toward making yourself and your small business great successes? Decide which ones you don’t really possess now and figure out how to acquire and use them to grow your business.
