Running a small business is much harder than running a corporation. Surprising? Not if you’re a small business entrepreneur. As a emerging business owner on a restricted budget you have to multi-task, juggle, prioritize and balance. Unlike corporations, you don’t have a specialized professional team to help you manage, allowing you to focus on more critical business strategies. Neither do you have the capital to afford such luxuries. At best you have about twenty employees that you need to train, supervise, motivate, schedule and pay. You’re the sole manager, running your business on a shoe-string budget with only 24 hours a day. Given such stressful financial and time constraints, how can you successfully maintain a balance between excellence, efficiency, and improving productivity all on your own? (From Surviving to Thriving: Mastering Small Business Operations)
THE ANSWER? THINK BIG :
Manage your business like the big corporations do. Corporations rely on efficient organization that is cost-effective. Today big businesses make use of business management software whenever possible to replace business processes that were once done manually, reducing costs of labor, time and human error.
>Scheduling employees, for instance, used to be a tedious, time-consuming task before automated scheduling software made schedules and shift management easier. (From Surviving to Thriving: Mastering Small Business Operations)
Today, small businesses can not only easily be a more efficient organization with the help of such software but can also obtain business software at no cost. The business software market offers a variety of free trial software programs for evaluation before purchasing. Those programs may have a time limitation, preventing you from fully exploring all their features. They may also have limited features, preventing you from testing all of them. If you like the program, you find out it carries a corporate price tag.
SKILLS REQUIRED TO RUN A SMALL BUSINESS :
Self-belief is an important skill required to be your own boss. If you have an inner belief and self confidence that you will make the business succeed, then you will have a great chance to make it work. There will be times when during a month you only earn a small amount of money but in other months you should earn quite a lot. Some people prefer to know exactly what their income will be each month and these people may struggle to be their own boss. (From Surviving to Thriving: Mastering Small Business Operations)
Discipline is another requirement if you are to be a success at running your own small business. It is very easy to become lazy or to have an extra couple of hours in bed in the morning. Even though you may have nobody to answer to, you have to be of the character to ensure you put in the required number of hours and work. I also think it is important to have a positive attitude. There will be periods when business is slow, this is where you may start to think in a negative way.
This can lead people into becoming very stressed and even depressed. By thinking in a positive way and by working even harder to attract more work is the only way to react in this situation. This of course is not that easy to do but in my opinion, there is not enough time in the day to get depressed.
ALWAYS TRY AND IMPROVE YOUR OWN SELF :
The ability to always try and improve your own self and to learn from any mistakes you make. We all make mistakes which is fine and natural. There is again not enough time to beat ourselves up over these errors, all we need to do is to learn from them and to then move on. We should always be looking at ways of improving the business as well as our own knowledge. This business industry is all about relationships and relationships are built through networking. You will need to make small business networking your priority for the first few months of operations. This is a process that can’t be rushed. But if you do participate in a small business networking event there’s a good chance that you will come away few quality contacts.
Once you make the contact you then have to spend time following up with meetings, proposals and sales calls. But this time is much better spent than chasing down one-shot clients. Though small business networking you make in-roads with people who are, or who can put you in touch with, the steady clients that will support your business long-term. Don’t expect to walk out of every event with a handful of paying clients. Do expect, however, to generate a bunch of quality leads and referral sources. These referrals and leads are the essence of small business.
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SMALL BUSINESS STARTUP – THE 90/10 RULE :
Small business startups require a lot of work. You might however, be surprised by what type of work should be taking up the majority of your time. Computer consultants, when they contemplate small business startups, tend to focus on the technical aspects of the business. The rational is that they want to offer a decent service and must have great technical skills before anyone will be willing to pay them. In fact, the 90/10 Rule tells us that during small business startups, 90% of your time should be spent on direct marketing activities and only 10% on building technical skills.
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SMALL BUSINESS MISTAKES :
Do you realize that there are mistakes you can make at various stages of your business’ growth that can be slowly killing it for months or even years if you don’t watch for them? These mistakes do exist and they are not just reserved for the beginner companies. Many working businesses, including those you might think are “successful” because they’ve been around for 10+ years, are often still making them… and are possibly losing a lot of money and/or wasting a lot of time in the process. Some of these big and sneaky mistakes seem aimed more at service type companies, they really do fit the bill for almost any type of industry.