Starting up a business itself is a difficult decision to make. Business means risk and only moderate risk takers can be successful at their venture. Any business is always a risk and if you are a business owner you would definitely agree on this one. Starting up a business is one thing, but taking it forward and scaling it up is a totally different task which comes with its own set of challenges.
- Organizing your records is very important for a business. You may want to go digital on all your customer records because it makes things faster and more efficient to search rather than making some employee go through stacks of files just to find one piece of paper.
- Make your business personal to you. By doing so, you become sensitive to the ups and downs of the business and take more interest in making it successful. You also become more focused on the success and in the process become attached to it. If you cannot get attached to something, you can never live with it. If you are unable to live with your business, you would find hard time making it grow.
- Make your employees brain storm to make their area of work more challenging and interesting to work with. If you give them the freedom bring change to their area of work so as to make it better, they would do it (most of them). A happy employee always outputs better results which is in favour of the business.
- There can be times when you may need to sacrifice attending a family function for business call. You must always be ready to sacrifice certain things to some extent for example taking calls on Sunday if its too important. I have seen people who get annoyed to receive calls on Sunday and it also happens that they have never been able to scale up their business in past few years because of their attitude and lack of desire to sacrifice at times.
- Keep your social life active. It is one way through which you can build contacts and that might help you gain customers. Such practices often prove to be very fruitful if you are in countries in Africa, Asia or South America where businesses grow because of the word of mouth.
- One of the most important points is to provide excellent service or product to the customers. If you provide services make sure that it is consistent over time and if you manufacture/sell products make sure that they are of good quality. Once the customer recognizes the quality of your business, he will come back and may even refer others to buy your product.
- Keep reserves of money for times when business might go in difficulty. Using saved money will always be helpful than contacting loan companiesand then never being able to save again.