As earlier stated, owning and running your own business is not an easy job. It involves a lot of hardwork, determination and self discipline. It requires tremendous focus, persistence, willpower and confidence in every area of your business activities.
Every new business investment requires a high level of optimism. You need to believe in yourself, your product and the future possibility of your business.
As a new business owner, you are going to face some tough time and make wrong decisions at the beginning.You are going to make mistakes. But no need to fear or get discouraged, this is normal since you are just starting. And as days go by, you grow, you learn and get better at playing the game.
SUCCESS OF YOUR BUSINESS
To ensure your new business survive and thrive in its highly competitive market, you have got to consider the following factors....
* Offer a product or service that you know people need and want, and will be ready to pay for at a price that will be acceptable to them. Creating a business is about solving people's problems and creating values. Your product should aim at satisfying certain want of the consumer at a price the consumer finds reasonable, with high quality and benefits. And as you grow in your business, you improve on your product just as consumers and competitors tastes changed.
* Identify your ideal customer. When starting a new business, you should identify and determine your target market, your ideal customers, the exact people who will buy your product or service at a reasonable price.
* Know your competitors and make your product and service excellent. For your new business to survive and thrive, you must strive to be equal or better than competitors.
Competition is good. It keeps you on your toes and motivates you to improve your product's price, quality, value benefits and features.
You make every efforts to outsmart your competitors by making your product / service unique, making it superior and more valuable to similar products being offered.
* Discipline yourself to work long hours in order to get to the top of your career. As a new business owner and an average entrepreneur, there is a need for you to spend more hours working than usual in the first few years of building your business. You must be prepared and disciplined to put in more amount of time and hardwork if you want to make your mark and get to the top of your field.
* Develop a complete sales system of how to get your product out and keep it selling itself plus a quality control system to ensure that every product and service is of high quality. To ensure that your customers are so satisfied that they will happily buy from you again and also tell their friends about your product or service.
* You need to develop a customer service policy that treats your customer so well that they become loyal to you and choose your product over that of competitors.
MEASURING THE SUCCESS OF YOUR BUSINESS
The purpose of a business is to please its customers and to create and keep them in a cost effective manner. Profit is not the purpose of a business but the result of creating and keeping a sufficient number of customers who yield sufficient number of profits after all costs.
In every business, the customer is the king. Every effort and activities of your business must be aimed at satisfying customers in a manner that is better than that of competitors. A customer well satisfied brings about a repeat business. And it is when customers buy again that you can be sure you have successfully satisfied them.
Your product or service is not excellent because you think so. The only way to be sure your product or service is attractive and valuable is that people buy it willingly and then buy it again and tell their friends to buy it as well.
The key to long term profitability and measuring your business success is recommendations and referrals. All successful business rely on repeat business which is only possible when customers are well satisfied.
CONCLUSION
To succeed as an entrepreneur, you have got to be proactive, creative and innovative. Think about solutions and not the problems and concentrate on the most important things you can possibly be doing every hour rather than getting sidetracked by low or no value task or activity.
Develop a long time perspective for your business and set high standard for yourself and your product.You must continually be raising the bar on yourself and everyone within your area of responsibility.
There is no easy way to get to the top. There is no short cut to success. There is only one way and that is through hardwork.
It may take many years of discipline, willpower and efforts to make your mark, but sooner than later you shall start to reap the dividends of your hardwork.
