Skills and money are crucial for the success and growth of small businesses but your new business will need more than money and skills to survive and succeed. As startups expand and grow, founders and leaders need to consider how to constantly attract new customers in a changing and competitive environment, how to retain paying customers, how to retain and hire smart talent and industry experience for growth purposes. Challenges of starting and growing a company have always been a setback for most entrepreneurs.
Company culture is the personality of your business and it can’t be faked.
Founders need to get a good team around them as fast as they can to work on achieving company goals and milestones as soon as possible. Your initial team defines the culture of your company right from the start. Your company culture can attract and retain talent and you can also loose your great talent when your new hires are not comfortable working in the environment you have created. Companies with an adaptive culture that is aligned to their business goals routinely outperform their competitors.
When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
The ability to keep going when all seems lost. If you are still alive, you can keep it running and make it work. The perseverance and determination to see success are equally important to your growth and overall success. The ability to keep going when all seems lost can keep your company alive.
Be agile, stay focused and respond to change where necessary
Make sure your product is highly differentiated and solves the customer’s problem, market need or pain. Speed to market is crucial to the success of your business. The market changes so quickly and you need to adjust to stay in the competition. Be agile, stay focused and respond to change where necessary to be in business. The ability to spot a shift in customer demands and trends and respond in time could help you retain most of your customers. Don’t loose your customers to that new business because you are still holding on to old ways of doing business.
A happy customer tells one friend, an unhappy customer tells everybody
Enthusiasm and talent can carry you for a short time, but professionalism is what keeps clients coming back and recommending colleagues. Take charge of customer support, treat your new and old customers with maximum respect and always respond to their feedback, comments and issues. Satisfied customers can recommend your product to their friends and colleagues, they could even tweet or share with their hundreds or even thousands of followers. Now that is free marketing for your business when your customers are satisfied. An unsatisfied customer can equally do damage to your online reputation and cost you new clients.
Share your success story
Make sure you are always establishing relationships even if they seem unrelated and unprofitable. You will benefit from them going forward. Create and establish positive relationships with partners and prospective customers alike by being open to their queries. An employee might ask how you built your successful business–you can gladly share what has worked for you in the past. Founders can help followers and fans follow his their dreams by sharing productivity hacks with them via your company blog.
The most important thing is an absolute unwavering belief that your business will succeed, everything else is secondary.
3 comments
Some excellent points Thomas. I think it is also worth pointing out that when you start a new business you need to learn to focus on the ‘what’ and not ‘how’. What I mean by this is that initially you maybe the only employee, or more accurately the only person working for your company. This means that you will be responsible for everything from soup to nuts.
You need to remember that you are driving this thing – so you must focus on ‘what’. focusing on ‘what’ means focusing on what your company does. You can employ other people to do the ‘how’. There are many skilled workers out there who are far better qualified than you at every aspect of your business – so employ them. Initially you can divide the work that you need to achieve into packets and give it to freelancers to do. This can be very cost effective, it will also give you the time to steer your ship.
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