Over the past 20-years we have started, sold and continue to run very successful businesses. In addition to all of this we have had a hand in several hundred other top businesses, some via friends or mentors we have lent our help to while others have paid to benefit from our experience.
We all wished we could look into the future and take the knowledge, experience, positive and negative experiences and somehow speed up the learning curve so we can achieve business success faster with less pain along the way.
So I thought I would do what I could to help bring out the experience and teachings from my years as an entrepreneur, building and running businesses to help you fast-track your own business success starting right now.
We can summarize all of the different techniques, strategies and experiences down to 4 fundamental principles of business success, here they are:
1. Know Why
In some cases this principle is missed because many driven entrepreneurs already have a Big Why embedded in their brains subconsciously. It could be from a family that raised them to control their business fate, a bad first job that was so painful they became jaded toward jobs where being an entrepreneur was the ONLY option. It could have been an early dance with self-employment through a student paper, selling door-to-door, running a landscaping business or even selling lemonade that initiated the addiction with being in control of one’s own paycheck and fate. For others, it takes some work to find that big WHY that will fuel you through the many challenges of growing your own successful business. Know this however, there MUST be a big why behind your desire to start and run businesses…it is the most universal trait of all that binds those who achieve business success from those who do not.
2. Think Big & Expect Setbacks
Fueled by the burning desire to succeed, the WHY that will make you unstoppable is an ability to think outside of the box, think bigger than your competition (in terms of filling gaps in your marketplace) and an almost inhuman ability to expect and handle setbacks. True entrepreneurs understand that the quickest path to business success is to stumble, learn, adapt and improve. Setbacks are a part of that cycle, thus are inevitable.
3. Laser-Focused Assistance
Great entrepreneurs are masters at pulling the right information from the right people at exactly the right time. How do they do it? By knowing exactly what they are looking for at a given point in time. Instead of asking general questions to general people, entrepreneurs are hell-bent on getting answers immediately to pressing, urgent, specific questions that stand between them and their desired outcome that minute. All of this means, of course, that you need to be laser-focused on your business knowing exactly what your game-plan is and knowing what stands in your way at that moment not being distracted by everything else going on around you.  My wife has seen me in these moments and can’t believe how well I block everything around me when I’m in that zone of making progress.
4. Take Action
Nothing happens without taking action. That’s all you really need to know. There is no substitute. You can be the best researcher, planner, thinker, dreamer, wisher…the most motivated, positive, outgoing and well-intentioned person – it means nothing unless you become a professional at taking action, assessing the results, making modifications and taking action again. You want to know how to speed up your business success? Take more action faster…that will get you further, faster than anything else.
We rarely are good at each one of these, but we can become good. If you are great at coming up with start-up business ideas, but can’t seem to get them moving, then work on taking action and being laser-focused. If you are continually stumbling with your persistence or sticking with ideas as you stumble, work on refining/finding that BIG WHY that will help you become more determined.
To successful entrepreneurs, business success is a lifestyle choice as much as a one-time event…it is a way of life, a chosen direction with an exciting journey. Is that the way you see it in your life? Are you any closer to your dreams of achieving business success? Leave us a comment.
