If you own a business, then you know the importance of being the best you can be. What happens all too often is that people have a passion for the work, so they try to be a business owner. However, in the end they fail because passion for the work doesn’t mean that you’ll be a good business owner. In fact, it means that you will likely be a terrible business owner. Running a business takes a lot of time, commitment, and dedication to running the business: you are left with little time for the actual work. If you find yourself struggling, take time to learn about business.
Read. Read a Lot
If you take some time to look at what business owners all have in common, you will find that many of them spend multiple hours of their day reading. Why is that? Don’t they have a business to run? Yes, they do have a business to run. And they also know that there have been hundreds of business owners that came before them. Hundreds of business owners that were much more successful than they were. They turn to books in order to tap into that knowledge so they can be better at their business too.
Outsource. Outsource a Lot
Businesses starting on a shoestring budget all make the same mistake: they try to do it all. They want to do the labor, run the business, be marketers, write the paychecks, do bookkeeping, and more. They wear themselves out because they simply try to do too much. Those who are successful right away know that they can’t do it all themselves. So they hire out. They get someone to write their content, someone else to do marketing, someone else to do their taxes, and someone else to take care of customers. They know that many hands make light work, and in the end the company grows much faster.
Track Analytics
This is the hardest one to do, but it is also incredibly important. If you have run marketing campaigns, you need to track how well those have worked. Without tracking, you may be throwing away your money on campaigns that drive absolutely no business. If you have a website, you need to know what people are searching in order to land on your site. Without it, you may be targeting the wrong keywords. The point is that you need to know what works, and what doesn’t, and fine tune your process to ONLY do the things that work. Your business will explode with growth when you do this.
Being a Business Owner
Running a business is hard work. But if you apply yourself to the pursuit of knowledge, and you put into practice all that you read, you can learn how business works. Then you can apply that to your passion. Don’t get the cart before the horse. I am a writer and SEO expert in Billings, Montana. I love working on my business and learning more about business. I also love helping others with their business. Email me to learn how I can help build yours.
What are your biggest challenges as a business owner?