Being a business person in charge of their own company comes with its own set of perks. Financial freedom, positive impact on the world, doing what you like and living a fulfilled life are just some of them. But you won’t gain this without trouble.
There will be a lot of hard work and sacrifice from your part if you want to build a successful business. It is likely that you will experience setbacks, frustrations, and challenges along the way. The road to prosperity is not a straight path. It twists and turns, looking more like a maze than a road. However, just because it is difficult doesn’t mean that there aren’t rules to make the journey more bearable.
Search for ways to better serve your current audience
Look at the audience that’s engaging with your brand. Look further, at those who have bought and keep buying from you. If there is a solid list of 5,000 people or more, rather than concentrating on adding them to your social media or email list, focus on creating new epic content for the individuals that you’ve already engaged.
What challenges they face and how could they overcome them? What new program or product do they need next? Your customers aren’t looking for content, they are looking for solutions. And every product, service or piece of content is a possible solution to a problem. When an individual purchases your service or product, what they’re buying is the solution to a particular challenge – whether its better health, less weight, saving time, etc.
In their quest to resolve an issue, your audience looks for information that can help them. This is why, as a company, it makes sense to build content that educates your target audience, all while binding directly to the problem that your business helps your customers solve.
The power of word-of-mouth marketing
Whether your company operates in a small town or in a sprawling metropolis, word of mouth is crucial for business. Most persons look online for reviews of businesses before a purchase. Therefore, having a good reputation is fundamental to the growth of your organization.
How-to of positive word of mouth is easy. All you need to do is to provide excellent, professional service, develop and monitor your online and local reputation, and gain publicity by giving back to your community in the form of supporting or sponsoring charities and organizations.
Maintain your business credit score
Improving business credit is an essential part of growing a company. Whether your enterprise is funded by you or by banks and investors, there will come a time when a positive business credit rating will be more than worthwhile. A strong company credit score enhances the growth of your firm and allows you to more easily receive financing. Moreover, it increases the value of your business and protects your personal credit.
Just like you would monitor your personal credit score, you should also monitor the credit score of your business. Common factors that influence it are:
· public records – such as bankruptcies and liens,
· demographic data – such as years on file and company size,
· credit – such as payment habits and outstanding balances.
A slow increase of missed payments or collections on your business profile can cause a low credit score. If you want to create a strong company credit score, the best way to do it would be to pay your bills on time, build a positive payment history and monitor your file to ensure accuracy.
Store cash and energy for rainy days and errors
Sound advice. However, most of the time enormously hard to achieve. What average startup or growing business has storage of cash that just sits back? The point is, you have to run as lean as you possibly can and never waste energy and money. There will be some mistakes and bad luck along the way, but you can overcome them, especially with a nice war chest filled with capital to handle it.
Even more, figure out how to complete your objectives on a small budget – then actually use only a half of it. Most of the projects in the long run jump in cost and completion time at least by double. Again, apply the concept of lean:
· No luxury offices
· No full-color brochures
· No fancy vehicles
The point is to stay alive until you start running a highly profitable business.
Research the competition
Unless your company deals with fictional kryptonite, it is likely that it faces other businesses that offer a similar service or product. To be hyper-competitive, you will need to go beyond what your competition offers. How? With competitive analysis – a type of research that specializes in acquiring and reviewing of data about rival firms.
It is a vital step for finding out what your competition is doing and how big of a threat they are to your business. To start, you can simply collect bits of data available in the public domain, from financial filings to reports from accounting firms. You can also find local and national news articles about them or go to online databases from government sources like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Success can be followed. As an entrepreneur, you don’t always have to learn from your mistakes. No matter what phase your organization is in, there are always other sources of knowledge such as books, posts, companies and people that can teach you something new. We went through our own and decided to pull out some quintessential rules for creating a wildly prosperous business and share them with you.
