Small business successes don’t just happen as it takes smart work to make it happen as we all know. The only problem is that a lot of people think that it takes hard work to make a small business succeed when in fact it only takes smart work to successfully manage a small business.
In this article, I will be sharing tips that will help you manage your small businesses smartly which will ensure that you succeed in managing your small business.
SMALL BUSINESS SUCCESS TIPS
The rest of this article will provide you with concise tips on how to successfully manage a small business. As you will see, the tips are in bullet point. Two reasons for this are (1) the points are self-explanatory (2) I don’t intend to make this post two long like the small business management inbox article that I wrote last week which was over 2000 words.
Mental preparation
- Love what you are doing or about to start
- Develop thick skin as people will doubt you
- Don’t quit your day job yet
- Be prepared to overcome failure
- Be ready to sacrifice some sleep at the early stage
Developing strategies
- Product development strategy
- Marketing strategy
- Financing strategy
- Public relations and online presence strategy
- Acquisition and deployment of business IT strategy
- Integrated information security strategy
- Brand building strategy
- Asset utilization strategy
Planning
- Create a business plan
- Succession plan
- A well-articulated investment strategy
- Logistics planning
- Supply chain planning
- Continuity planning
- Have a plan for networking
- Prepare growth and development plan
- Have a learning and development plan
Employing and retaining people with the right skills
- Identifying and hiring smart workforce like a small business accountant
- Treat employees with respect and build trust
- Have an organizational chart
- Reducing attrition level (i.e reducing staff turnover rate)
Customer relations management
- Putting customers first
- Rendering quality customer services
- Delivering quality goods and services
- Giving customers easy payment options for example accepting paypal or bitcoin
Executing your plans
Action! Action!! Action!!!. Nothing gets done by inaction. It is better to start and then perfect what you have started that wait for that perfect time when you have to rollout your perfect plan.
All successful entrepreneurs that I have chatted with say that you must kill procrastination for you to be successful as a small business owner. These people cannot be wrong because they have something to show for it, please take their advice.
Repeating
I made the mistake of thinking that small business success is a destination that you only arrive at once and remain there forever. In order to remain successful as a small business owner, you have to rinse and repeat formulas that works. Don’t give room for complacency because complacency is the greatest enemy of small business success.
Conclusion
In this article, we have briefly identified small business critical success factors that when followed will put smile on the face of the small business owner. These things don’t just happen; we must go to work in order to get result.
Remember that none of these has to be necessarily hard work as it pays to work smarter rather than work harder.
Good luck.
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