When you enter into self-employment and the world of small business you are confronted with numerous challenges.  For the sake of simplicity I will break those challenges down into two areas.

1.  The Hard Skills.  These are the tasks you perform to have your small business grow and prosper.  These could range from accounting to executing a marketing plan.  And you can find many experts to assist you.

2.  The Soft Skills.  These have to do with people.  More importantly, these have to do with how you see your relationships.  How you see your relationships will determine how you relate to people.

Sadly, with such a great emphasis on the hard skills, the soft skills are very often ignored.  Yet, to have small business growth and a successful small business, the soft skills are the most important.

Ask yourself the following question.  How am I motivated to see people?

• Are they human doings where I just focus on their accomplishments?  Am I primarily concerned about how they will benefit me and my business?
• Are they human beings where I focus on who they are and acknowledge them for the good their presence brings to my business?

In working with hundreds of business owners over the years, I have seen the greatest strides in growing  small business take place when the owner focuses on the human being as well as what that person can do.

Owning your own business is a huge challenge.  And, as you grow, the biggest challenge, the one that can bring you success you never imagined, or failure that you never wanted to face, is how you are motivated to relate to people.

Get that balance in your motivation between what people do for you and appreciating them for who they are.  A good first step to change your motivation to appreciate people for who they are is to practice liking people.

You practice liking people by being a “good finder”. Find the good in others and focus on it.  More importantly, let them know about it.  When you give out this type of acknowledgement in slices, it comes back in loaves.

After all, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

That’s right!  To be successful in growing your small business you must know that when everything else fails all you need to do is go back and read the directions.

You may be asking yourself, what does he mean?

Growing small business and small business growth don’t come with directions.

You are right in one sense.  Yes, you can read a small business ebook or books about small business success. Or you can have consultants, advisors or coaches to help you along.

But, without a clear set of directions you are 60% more likely to fail.  What are directions?  Directions are the goals you set.  Goals are not just for a week or a month.

Goals must also be long term.  They must give direction for the next year, five years out and ten years and beyond.

To have the success you desire you must have goals.  Your goals are the directions you will go back to read.  They will keep you on course.  They will help keep the vision of success alive.

Yet, without goals you will have a tendency to waste a lot of energy wandering and bumping into things.  This takes time, energy and causes pain.  It happens because you have no set of directions.

• Create your own set of directions.
• Create your own performance strategy for success.
• Write down your goals.

When you do these things you increase the odds of your success by 60%.  Those are the directions for small business growth and success.

Jim Rohn once said, “Motivation alone is not enough”. Think about it.  If motivation were all it took for you to have the business and life you want then you would have it.

When you start your business you are motivated.  As Michael Gerber says in the “E-Myth Revisited”, you have an entrepreneurial seizure.  You are motivated to start your business.  You have a successful vision of the future.

Yet, here you are six months or six years down the road and somehow your motivation has not turned into the reality of what you envisioned.  For many who are self-employed, just the opposite has happened.

In fact your motivation has led you to create a job for yourself that you don’t like and/or a business that has put you in bondage.  You may be prosperous but somehow the pieces of the puzzle aren’t fitting together.

What can turn this around? To finish the Jim Rohn quotation, “Motivation alone is not enough.  If you have an idiot and motivate him, you have a motivated idiot.”  The point is that all of us have our idiotic tendencies and you must identify yours.  Here are three critical points.

• Growing small business is about growing you.  If you don’t grow neither will your business.
• Without taking action, new action, nothing will change.
• Is it going to make any more sense tomorrow than it does today to start heading in the direction that will give you the business and life you want?

Be brutally honest with yourself. Get the input of others to give you a clear picture of what you must do to grow your business and your life.

Take the action and you will cure the fear that is holding you back.  When you do your motivation will take you in the direction of greater success in your business and life.

Are you an accident prone business owner?  If you are then you are traveling a rough road for yourself and your business.  Accidents are those things that take away our energy, focus and ability to complete the things that must be completed to be successful.  They can kill small business growth.

Accidents are the distractions, that if not avoided, can lead you to failure. Now, we can’t eliminate accidents but we can certainly minimize them.  When we do, we increase our odds of success.

Consider this:

1.  Self-employment and growing small business is a great challenge.

2.  To have successful small business growth you must develop new skills and new thinking.

This is continous process.

The key to avoiding or minimizing accidents and increasing your odds of success depends on your ability to develop new disciplines.  If you have a way of thinking or doing things that is not bringing you the results you want you must change.

The only way to change and move to success is to develop new disciplines.

What is a discipline?

A discipline is the bridge between a thought and an action.  When you put a thought for improvement together with the action to improve then you have a new discipline.

Start with some small disciplines and work up to the bigger ones.  After all, the small business life is going to throw you some pretty big challenges.  If you haven’t mastered the small ones then you don’t have much of a chance with the bigger ones.

Master the art of create new disciplines and you will have fewer accidents and greater success.

How we address failure will determine our success.  The pain of failure is great.  It may keep us up at night and ruin our relationships and hurt those we care about.   When confronted with failure, it is our opportunity to change and bring success into our business.

Small business growth is about embracing change.  It is an immutable law that you cannot grow without change.  Taken one step further if you don’t learn new ways of looking at things then you and your business will never change and probably not be successful.

Nobody wants to fail in business.  As a self-employed business owner your entrepreneurial instincts tell you in the beginning that you will succeed at the business you are creating.

Then after a short period of time, or it could be years you have to come face to face with the fact your business and your life is headed in the wrong direction.

Understand two things about failure:

1.  It is the accumulation of many small errors in judgement

2.  These errors are accumulated over a period of time.

Usually, failure usually is not one grand event.  It is the culmination of many things that lead to the signature event everyone remembers.  Failure is subtle.

Learn how to detect failure.  Correct the small errors as you go along by developing new disciplines.  A new discipline may be a different way of doing things or a better way of thinking.  Both of these demand that meaningful change must take place.

You have a choice when it comes to change.  You succeed when you embrace change.  You fail when you let change run over you.  Discipline yourself to embrace change and you will increase your odds of success.

Growing small business and having your small business running successfully have many components.  Yet, without an underlying vision to guide you to creating the freedom and abundance you desire, you may consume more time and energy than you should. 

After all, would you rather reach your goals and your vision of the future sooner or later?  The choice is yours.  Small business growth is a choice. The little secret of owning your own business is that the very thing we created to give us greater freedom and abundance has put us into bondage.  We have given very real meaning to the phrase, “life is a do it to yourself proposition.“ 

And, if we don’t change we will reach our goals and vision later rather than sooner.  Why is this important?  We can always spend more money.  But we can’t spend more time. 

Yes, time management work is important but think about this.  We create something that is our identity and yet we are unhappy.   In fact, I work with successful business owners who hate their jobs.  Sounds weird but it is true. 

How do we get on the right track to freedom and abundance?  The key is to start focusing on the present and the future.  Use the past as a school to learn from.  Otherwise, put the past in the trunk.  After all, we can’t change the past. 

To get started on the road to success you desire you must incorporate the following:

1.  Change your thinking

2.  This will change your habits

3.  In turn this will change your activity

4.  Changing your activity will change your results

5.  And changing your results will change your life.

 Start with a small changes in your thinking and be committed to them.  Incorporate them today.  Then do some more.  You can build confidence with the small ones and when you do it will allow you to take on the bigger ones and move to the business and life you desire.  This is your performance strategy the small business growth and the personal growth you desire.

Very often I hear this question.  How can I have success or bring more success into my business and life? 

There are literally an infinite number of paths one can take to achieve the success they want personally and in growing small business. 

But there is one step to having a successful small business that you must take.

You must come to the edge and…….

What do you think is next?  What do you have to do when you come to the edge?

To grow a small business you must know the next step.  When you do, you can choose the pathway to the success you desire. 

It is a step you can take yourself.  But, more often than not, it is taken with the help of others.  It could be an associate, friend, small business coach or business advisor. 

To have a successful business you must come to the edge and…..

When most people come to the edge they pull back and say, “I can’t get much closer or I will fall.”

Fear sets in.  As a result things stay the same.  The success and freedom they desire eludes them.  Their frustration mounts. 

The answer to be successful is to find the right person to be with you when you come to the edge.  The right person will be there to push you over the edge. 

And at the very moment they push you off the edge you will become more and strive for the success you desire because you will have to learn how to fly.

Learn how to fly and you will be successful.

If you are wondering where your next sale, job or client is coming from that is not a good feeling.  If it is continual it is even worse.   Owning your own business can have many challenges including the fear of not knowing or having a grasp on our sales and how to get sales.  These are a few of the things that can keep us up at nights and put our stomachs in knots.  

How do you move beyond this stage?  You must have a marketing performance strategy.  Quite simply you must have a plan for action.  Then you must execute the plan.  And, here’s the key.  You must execute it consistently.  This is where most people fall short.  They don’t execute the plan.  

1.  The first step to successful small business is having a performance strategy for  marketing.

2.  The second step to business success is then executing it.  

There is nothing fancy here.  To get off this treadmill of uncertainty you must take action.  Action cures fear.     

Put together an action plan for marketing your business.  Go out and start performing it every day. 

Start with some small things to build your confidence.  When you do you can work up to the bigger ones.  Then you will have your small business running with a plan and in turn you will have greater confidence and peace of mind.

When owning your own business one focus is more small business growth. In an earlier post I talked about the first rule of exceptional customer service, which is to have a good attitude.  A good attitude means having your customer service set up to provide for the needs of your customers, not your needs.  For many that would seem to be obvious.

Rule #2 has to do with your employees or independent contractors if they are to be involved in customer service.  One of the biggest mistakes I see in small business coaching is not giving the very people who can help you with the process of providing exceptional customer service, ownership of how to provide good customer service.

As a result, the customer service department or area bumps along and becomes your negative marketing department. Of course this doesn’t help any one’s attitude or morale.  To get others and you, the small busines owner,  truly involved in providing exceptional customer service you can start practicing with your employees or contractors.

When you do you will have a small business running well and a successful small business for you, your employees and your customers.  And, the satisfaction you will feel from a growing small business will be great.

Instruct them that when they bring you a problem that you also want them to bring three solutions.  If they have two or one, that is okay.  But, ask for three.  Listen to these solutions.  And, more importantly, look for ways to incorporate anything good you hear into the customer service process.  Not only do you start building a sense of ownership but also a sense of team.  Your employees know and feel that we are all in this together.

If you practice having them offer solutions to problems and giving them ownership in the outcome you will start building a customer service department that is on the way to being exceptional and part of your positive marketing department.  When you sow these seeds you will reap small business success and small business growth.

Too often when we are self-employed we focus on outside circumstances and things.  In a way, we let them lead our lives.  One of the steps to business success is to be a business owner who knows how to filter the good from the bad.  What I am referring to is your ability to let the good stuff in and to keep the bad stuff out.

Think about it.  Most of the information you receive is because you allow yourself to receive it.  One of the keys to leading yourself to have small business growth and to growth in  life is to look at what you are allowing into your mind.  I have worked with many business owners who see remarkable improvement when they start filtering out the negative information that comes to them.

After all, if you have no control over something there is very little need to keep being informed about it.  Certainly, it is okay to know that it exists.  But, to continually focus on something that you can’t control creates two negatives.

1.  You feel a sense that you are powerless.  This will actually keep you from leading yourself and your business forward. 

2.  The second thing is that once you receive negative information and keep bringing it up it is like bringing up something from the past that you can’t change.  When you can’t change something it will rob you of the initiative to move forward in your business and your life.

You may ask why is developing this filtering mechanism important to your well being.  Remember two things. 

1.  In small business coaching and coaching success I have business owners focus on the fact that their mind is a muscle.  You can lead yourself well by feeding your mind with good positive thoughts. 

2.  Secondly, owning your own businesss andleading yourself in your business and life is not as much about managing time as it is about managing energy.  Time management work is important.  But, the results of time management will be reflected in the level of energy you maintain.

When you are focusing on the present and the future, and the positive they can bring, then you will have the energy.  More importantly, when you have the energy you can carve out the time to do those things that will allow you to design the business and life of freedom and abundance you desire.

Follow the steps to business success and you will lead yourself to the business and life you desire.