The month of January is typically a time when entrepreneurs pause to take stock of their progress over the past 12 months, and to set new goals for the year ahead. Whether you are a seasoned business owner, or at the initial stages of your entrepreneurial journey, these 8 simple strategies can help you build a solid foundation for your business, and foster the sustainable success that all business owners seek.
- Find your passion, and create a vision for your business that is fueled by that passion. Make sure that your business vision aligns with your core values. Always remain true to those values, and let them guide your journey through challenges and triumphs.
- Stick with what you know best, and don’t try to be all things to all people. Authenticity in business, as in life, is a key to success, so always let the authentic you shine through.
- Identify your limits, and create a strategy to overcome. One way to do that is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, and give them room to do what they do best. That way, everyone wins.
- Devote sufficient time and resources toward building your business infrastructure — financial, legal, HR, technology, etc. — even if it means foregoing short-term gains. While going for the “low hanging fruit” may be tempting, that strategy is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain over time.
- Commit to building a solid reputation for integrity and excellence, and guard that reputation with everything you have. Remember, your reputation is your most precious business asset. Once it’s tarnished, it can never be fully recovered.
- Stay in close touch with your longtime contacts, and treat them as the valuable assets that they are. You never know when you may need to call on them, so it’s best to stay “top of mind” with them at all times.
- Constantly look for opportunities to team with like-minded colleagues who can add value to your business, especially on prospective projects that could benefit from a collaboration between two or more partners. Remember, 50 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing.
- Find ways to acknowledge, appreciate and reward your team members every day. Encourage them to think outside the box. By building and supporting a creative work environment, your team will be stimulated to embrace challenges, and come up with innovative solutions that will benefit your clients as well as your business.
Some Closing Thoughts
Remember, the road to success is not a straight line, but rather, a crooked path, with many roadblocks and detours along the way. The combination of persistence, flexibility and tenacity is the “secret sauce” for sustained success in business, and elsewhere in life.