Knowing is fun – learning, much less so. For a small business, it’s often costly. Here are a few lessons you should get to know early:
Care for Your Employees
Successful small business owners are known for their ingenuity and their willpower. What they’re not as known for is for how they treat their employees. Generally, people don’t discuss how a company treats employees unless it’s with someone who’s considering employment there. This is important, as how you treat your employees affects your company’s future.
You’re not just looking to make them happy, either. Training and coaching them to become the kind of employees you’ll need down the line is important as well. It may be costly and time consuming, but you’ll be rewarded with loyal and skilled workers.
Don’t Forget Why You Began
Motivation is difficult to maintain, especially in the grind that is running a small business. Before long, you may find yourself burning out. What was once a beautiful dream is now just another slog. A good way to keep both your spirits and motivation up is to remember why you began. Even a simple desire to provide for your family can get you up and ready to go in the worst of days.
Accept Failure as Part of Your Life
No one builds a small business without a few missteps here and there. What separates successes from failures is how they deal with their failure. Anger, for example, is a common and perfectly natural reaction. Successful people don’t (try hard not to) make decisions when they’re angry and instead try to calm themselves down, accepting their failure and learning from it. Failures tend to ‘get stuck on the anger’, which often leads to poor decisions and further errors.
Failure doesn’t mean you’re doomed. It’s part of the process. The sooner you accept it, the earlier you’ll start bouncing back from setbacks and issues.
Use Everything
You can’t hold anything back if you want your company to succeed. The competition’s putting everything they can on the line to get ahead and stay ahead. If you want to compete, you need to use everything you can to get an advantage.
This doesn’t just matter from a financial standpoint. Friends, family, old co-workers – all these and more can provide you with valuable resources, such as contacts or extra hands in a pinch. Don’t be afraid to cash in or ask for favors if you need them. Take advantage (in a nice way) of whatever you can.
Be There
Sometimes, the most important things are the simplest. Something as innocuous as just going in (pitching up) whenever you need to can open up opportunities the ‘lazy’ or ‘not willing’ will miss. Being there at the office\shop can make you available for many things, from business or partnership opportunities, to teachable moments that will improve company performance and employee loyalty.
It doesn’t stop there. Going to events, for example, opens up networking abilities. Don’t sit around doing nothing. Participate in the world around you, and don’t let laziness or apathy dictate what needs to be done, and potentially cause harm to your small business.
There are literally hundreds of lessons that will help you on your journey to build a profitable small business, and hardly any time to learn them all. Talk to a mentor that can help teach you those lessons at an appropriate time. Learn from them and all the availability resources out there so you don’t make needless mistakes.
