Five Things Small Entrepreneurs Can Do To Ensure Success
Coaching yourself into a successful business
Small business owners have substantially more advantage than larger or corporate businesses in many aspects: there are fewer rigid structures in terms of processes and stakeholders and a better chance to impart personal touch on their positioning and branding when it comes to the audience. One of the assumptions is that innovation is just “icing on the cake”. However, what many do not realise is that continuous innovation is needed to keep stronger position and differentiate. A small business is in a much better position to introduce changes than a larger business.
What follows are the five main things I have distilled from experience in diverse environments as a consultant in product and innovation management in combination with self-improvement practices. These represent the biggest contributors to success. Forget about complicated strategies, competing or analysis. While it is important to know the market and the landscape, the effort which needs to be invested in those areas is much less than what one would think and should be done more organically by learning as you go. Corporates also spend fortunes on marketing and targeting customers. Small businesses can attract the right audience and introduce innovation without huge investments, where being creative and agile are important factors here.
Keep the clear vision
Vision is an image of where we want to be with our business, knowing it is about the destination and not how to get there. There are many tools one can use, as simple as journaling, mind mapping or more detailed concept development. The fun part is one can add or remove elements on the way to refine details and keep the vision alive. The main advantage with these methods is never losing sight on the bigger picture.
Closely connected to vision are main reasons we do things, referred to as “why’s” in short. These can be to contribute to a green environment or make a certain aspect of people’s lives easier. The set of “why’s” represents the main compass for decision making even in the most challenging times.
Continuously seek to innovate your offering
This cannot be stated often enough as this will ensure continuous differentiation over a longer term and strong positioning as opposed to directly competing. The good news is one does not have to invest heavily in order to do this. Small tweaks to the business model, the way one presents information, special support or a personalized service are just a few examples of the numerous ways that can already make a big difference. Some lessons learnt from a corporate environment can be applied, such as agile methodologies, where we start with the smaller lightweight version of our product or service and, later, finetune it depending on the feedback from customers and our keen observation.
Always be in the listening mode related to your market. This does not have to be extensive time-consuming research as small business can get closer to customers and can understand their needs much better. The so-called “market research” is done all of the time. Lead generation is an excellent opportunity to understand how to finetune your offering and not necessarily having to sell as the main goal. When customers feel they are being listened to, they are more open to share information or work with you.
One of the mostly overlooked advantages of being innovative is that one does not depend so much on the success of launching campaigns that may or may not work as we imagined. Consistently staying ahead of your customers is what brings you the power to determine your own positioning instead of being dependant on the moves somebody else is making.
Develop a unique voice
People can more easily see these days if the message is being repeated by others. Corporates slip into using bombastic expressions such as “customer is the king” to describe what is considered to be an obvious requirement for every service or to perpetuate that signing up to life-long plans will do you a great service. Not to mention the overuse of advertisements that no longer generate sparks of excitement even with the most impressionable people.
A small business has the opportunity to develop relationship by storytelling and presentation unique to them. Something that presents their offering, products and how they impact people’s life in a more authentic way. They have a much better overview of how customers react to their service which, in turn, can be presented in a way that speaks better to the niche they want to attract. Clients can be creatively engaged on social media and one always has to be on the look for other online opportunities. It is not uncommon to give a course, a webinar or even publish a book as the way to bring information. It will all depend on the type of the business and the mission.
Work with own creative genius
This is something that is almost never utilized properly in bigger organizations who choose complex decision-making processes, creating scorecards and dashboards in order to have it all nicely aligned in the excel sheet.
There are ways to tune to the part of the mind that is a lot greater than our conscious understanding and we can tap into this guidance regularly. When we do that, we achieve the so-called “quantum leaps” and this is no exaggeration. This is where a business owner has the opportunity to take the vision into the potent field and by working on themselves recognize the actions that will bring them closer to the final goal. Identifying themselves with own business is the advantage where these techniques will work more effectively than in the team that is setup only for the purpose of a single project.
There are many techniques for this such as visualizations and mood boards. However, working with dreams is what propels people into transformations they never thought possible. Any business owner can be, thus, coached into the mindset comparable to any other CEO capable of thinking big, this being the very thing to which they owe their success. My own experience showed me that one can work with dreams in different situations: when defining the vision, when performing decisions, weekly goal setting, doing a piece of writing or using this as a guidance when one feels stuck. There might be some preconceived ideas that working with dreams is not tangible, however, nothing is further from the truth. Dream planting exercises actually work efficiently when directed to weekly goals and practical things, they may not be solely related to bigger life themes.
The most important thing is to keep a journal which can be complementing to working on the journal for your vision as mentioned earlier. This is where your daily activities are aligned with the subconscious that is more active during the night, bringing both worlds on the same page.
The dream planting works even if one does not remember dreams. The main rationale behind this is that it simply means bringing intention before going to sleep. What makes it powerful is that it works on a much deeper level than similar exercises performed during the day. What can be a profound bonus of working with dreams regularly is that eventually one will increase the level of dreaming and be able to manipulate the dreamscape, which will reflect itself in even greater leaps of results.
Keep the balance between short-term and long-term plans
Finally, we arrive at the part that is less fun, but necessary to ensure regularity of the business. One needs to anticipate future steps in the form of a longer-term plan. This does not have to be some strict detailed plan, but options to put in the “pipeline”. You can take up items from this list to determine weekly short-term goals.
This enables being open to possibilities which can be always modified later. It is the place where one can work effectively with the subconscious mind to aid re-prioritizing your options or bring more information should a certain choice be the good one for you.
It is also important to introduce bigger revision points every couple of weeks to see if there are items in the pipeline that need to be modified. I like to use the method similar to the blue-ocean strategy to check which plans are changing in the manner of “creating something new”, “increasing the existing”, “reducing the existing” or “removing something”. This is a very helpful tool to introduce flexibly changes without disrupting the main flow of the business.
Final words
In order to work most effectively one can have an accountability person to report the weekly progress to. Remember, it is not about working hard for the sake of work itself, but devotion to the vision which always pays itself when consistently attended to. The small business has every advantage of being able to do so. During the whole time keep checking with yourself if you are still aligned with your mission and “why’s”. I don’t believe so much in having a plan B should your dream not come true, it is coaching yourself into a living, flowing business that can take interesting turns if one is only ready to trust the inner intelligence and see every outcome as an opportunity.
