As an entrepreneur or business owner of any sort, you will spend a whole lot of time working on making your business as successful as possible. Starting you own business is hard, and businesses have a high rate of failure, but the rewards can be tremendous.

There are quite a few details or aspects that you must pay careful attention to in order to have a continuously profitable business, so it isn’t exactly easy to keep yourself focused on the right thing. As a small business owner you will wear a lot of different hats, and this is needed, but the key is to wear the correct hat that proper time. This means that you need to always be aware of what you are spending your time on and asking yourself if that is the best use of this precious commodity at this time.

From advertising and promotion tactics, to the inner structure of your business and employee/managerial training and preparation, every decision or plan you make will ultimately determine how your business will turn out. By familiarizing yourself with all of the thought that goes into running your business successfully, you will be much less likely to make any crucial mistakes and the state of your business will almost always improve.

The first thing that you need to work on in a business is it’s structure and base. If your employees are not all on the “same page” so to speak, failure will be something that will only take a matter of time. Not only do you have to educate your employees as to how they should behave and what decisions they should make, you also must teach them exactly why they are supposed to behave in such a way. By giving your employees and managerial staff insight into the reasoning behind your decision making, you create a stronger bond and increase the chances of them doing good by your business.

After years of managing people I have come to the conclusion that people really do want to do a good job most of the time. They just don’t know what to do. If you can train them to do the right thing that is the first step. But, more importantly, by explaining the rationale behind actions they will learn what needs to be done in each new situation. This becomes very powerful for your organization as it grows. You just can not train for every little possibility. Instead, teach them how to make the right decisions on their own.

You employees can also be a big benefit when it comes to keeping you enterprise running smoothly and growing. They are the ones who are in the trenches and they often times have great ideas for improvement. Don’t hesitate to ask the opinion of these experts as they deal with the situations every day. If you are unsure about a particular market, or seem to be having problems in your current situation, your employees and managers are always the best place to start.

Advertisement or marketing of some sort is necessary regardless of what services or products you provide. Without informing your potential customer base of what you currently offer, you will have to rely solely on your location to bring you customers. Depending on where you are currently located and what services you offer, the type of advertisement that will be most effective can vary quite a bit. If you offer food or something that can be found in many places, directly advertising to surrounding residential and commercial customers will be most effective because of your current location.

If your services or products are rare or hard to come across, or they are something that can easily be shipped, then using advertisement techniques of a larger scale will undoubtedly be the best bet for you. If you don’t have much money to put towards your marketing campaign, consider making small investments such as newspaper ads or even hiring people to pass out flyers for local businesses and if you are marketing goods or services that can be used everywhere, then spend as much time as possible learning Online Business techniques. The Internet is the most important marketing tool that has ever been found and the business opportunities it provides are absolutely endless.

As an owner of any business, you have to be able to pay attention to every aspect of your store or venue all at once. Neglecting any single area of your service will often times spell the demise of many other areas that might not have even seemed to relate. Keep an eye out for any problems that might arise early and eliminate them as soon as possible – letting a small issue go unnoticed for any amount of time can create a much larger problem that you will regret for many years to come.

The biggest failure in small business owners is not realizing that they are no longer a hands on worker and now need to devote their time to actually running the business. This is two different skill sets. If you start a business and then do the work yourself, like a mechanic who opens an auto repair shop and then does all the repairs, then you have only bought yourself a job. You will have no chance of scaling that business up because you will have to do all the work. Instead, you need to think like a manager and develop employees who can do the hands on tasks so you can actually run the business.


Article supplied by Sam Ithell of Hard Hat Business Advice, a business friend of Zoo Design, offering specialist services to our clients.
At HARD HAT™ we are experienced business advisors who have all run our own businesses, so we know what it feels like, and are committed to providing immediate benefits – a rapid fix to whatever needs improving in your business,.. and yes, we can do all the other stuff too – strategy, positioning, differentiation, channels of distribution, marketing – and we’d love to work with you on developing your growth – but only after we’ve helped you to achieve stable profits!
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