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For those entrepreneurial spirits who are toying with the prospect of launching their own business, or perhaps already in the middle of making their concept come to life, it’s essential for all from time to time to touch base with the deciding factors that will determine your business’s success.

In business you need to allow your concept the opportunity to flourish, you need to persevere through the hard times and overcome various unpredictable obstacles, and you also need direction. To dig deeper into the elements that will determine your business’s success, read on.

Passion

Such an overused term, it could be argued that it’s beginning to lose its meaning. So let’s interpret what passion is and not confuse it with the romanticized view that people so fondly express. For instance, this may sound familiar to you, ’I knew from a young age that I always wanted to be a [insert job title here].’ If this sounds like you, good for you, you’re already well aware of what you’re passionate about and may wish to skip this part entirely. Alternatively, if you’re baffled about your passions, and why this matters when starting a business, read on.

Firstly, let’s go back to basics, what do you enjoy doing/thinking of/reading about/searching for? What are you drawn back to doing over and over again? For some, this may come quickly, for others it could take a little longer to fathom. Once you’ve found what it is you are passionate about it’s essential to apply this somehow to your business. As you’re probably familiar with the saying

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life,” Confucius once said.

A great saying, however, try not to take this too literally. What you are happy to do the majority of the time is essential, yes, but be prepared, especially in business, to deal with things you’re are not so keen on. It’s part and parcel of being a business owner until you can afford to hire people to do the parts of the business you’d instead not do. As an example, let’s say you love drawing illustrations and at the moment work self-employed, but you despise social media management and filling in your end of year tax returns. The answer to this is, join the club. We live in the real world, and not everything in business is flowers and roses. However, your passion should be there for a large part of what you’re doing, otherwise what’s the point? You’ll only find it harder to go the distance when obstacles crop up during launching, maintaining and growing your business. Which is why your passion, is a deciding factor of whether your business shall be a success or failure.

Education

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Whether you’re forming your business plan to present to investors, designing the branding for your logo, or perhaps you’re looking to study a field entirely out of the realms of any roles and businesses you ever experienced before, there is one essential aspect in business that applies to all entrepreneurs. Knowledge! The time and effort you invest in acquiring experience and intelligence around the field you are hoping to use to form a business is non-negotiable.

In an ever-changing world, no one should rest on the knowledge and experiences they already possess. Marketing, business management, HR processes, design software for new products, online accounting is adapting and improving consistently, and you need to keep abreast with what’s going, or you could risk missing opportunities and falling behind.

Keep your brain active with networking, WLU Online courses, hands-on experience, survey your competitors, seek new opportunities and stay one step ahead of other business owners to find and experiment with quicker alternative ways to simplify drawn-out business processes. As your intelligence grows, and you apply this to your business, your business will grow too.

Fear

How do you know your innovative business idea is going to work? How do you know it won’t be pushed to the side and ignored by customers? You don’t, and that’s the consistent cost of owning a business, your fear of failure. You fear will either be one of two things. Your worst enemy playing on your insecurities and which eventually leads to you stopping the business together as the pressure becomes too much. Or your fear will act as a judgment telling you something isn’t good enough, in turn, sparking your frustration or honest critique to encourage you to do better try harder and keep going. How you interpret your fear and whether you use it to your advantage or not, is a deciding factor of the life or death of your business.

Goals

A simple, effective way to get your business going in the best direction or at least some guidance is to establish where you are going. For instance, as a car mechanic, your goals might be to decide on a name for your business, register as self-employed, invest in some tools, search for a van you can purchase to become a mobile mechanic and then save up the funds to own your own garage and employ others to work with you. Any goal setting needs a timeline of some description. Without it, there’s no real urgency to get your tasks done so that you can move on to the next challenge. In doing so your business is ticking along with a purpose, whether you’re striving towards gaining a diploma in beauty therapy to work self-employed, to attain more knowledge by hiring a business mentor, or saving to invest in a bouncy castle to rent out, goals are everything in determining whether your business will succeed or not.

Knowledge and expertise practiced and progressed consistently, will help you towards success in business. Passion for parts of your business at least will be the driving force to help you persevere through the tough times. Managing your fear effectively will allow you to use this emotion to your advantage to gain the best out of your business, and prevent you from shying away from opportunities and the next challenge. Goals will give you structure, a vision for your business, a path to success, identifying what needs to get done, why it needs to be done and how you’re going to do it.

 

Contributing Author