Tips on How to Grow Your Business

Develop motivation

It is very important to approach life and any activity with faith, confidence, and the feeling that all is going to turn out well. Different people get motivated in different ways and you should always be able to remind yourself what you are fighting for and why do you want to achieve a specific goal. Wasting too much resources and taking your eyes off the destination could erode your desire to continue doing the things you do. Beside money and time, any business will absorb a large amount of enthusiasm and optimism. But be prepared as things will not evolve in a linear growing trend. Expect to see ups and downs and learn to look at what really is important, the area beneath the graph (your overall input over time) and the average your efforts are producing. Nobody is always winning and what it matters is to keep your head up and look at the future from the moment you admit every small defeat.

Develop a good plan/strategy

Although many share an initial enthusiasm, building and growing a business solely on positive emotions is not going to work on the long term. You need to come up with a sound plan that will explicitly include future actions, in a step by step manner, which is easy to follow. You probably already know that when plan A doesn’t work it’s time to switch to plan B. That is not just a metaphor and you might even consider extending to include Plan C, D, etc, as long as this gives you comfort and the feeling of safety. Don’t expect a good plan to look the same way a cooking recipe does. Employees, material resources, and time are not your average uniform ingredients, on which you have total control. Consider your plan a living creature, which evolves and spreads, eager to adapt to new environments and the associated challenges. Don’t be afraid to amend your plan often and see it mutate towards the new imposed directions.

Start with a solid base

                The same way a house is erected starting from the bottom, your business will grow from something you will not later see – the foundations. The aspect and caliber of foundations, for both a house and a business plan, is a crucial factor, because it dictates how much you will be able to expand above ground and how durable the structure you are building really is. A solid base will always give you the chance to start fresh, even if all the carefully crafted plans didn’t went as well as they seem on paper. A solid base will prevent you from hitting rock bottom when your business fails and acts also like a safety net. A money deposit, someone backing you, a day job or even a second business can all act as buffer for you to be able to sleep nights. A business should never be a gamble on a single card.

Watch and learn

                You have to remember that you are not the only person facing dilemmas and problems. When things are stuck and your business is not advancing in any direction, you can always cheat a little a bit and watch how others are doing. Of course, from the outside, problems will seem to resolve themselves for others, but if you dig deeper and learn to read between the lines, you will see that others are facing bottlenecks and setbacks the same way you do. But looking further, it’s the way they handled the situations and how they kept their heads up in the sun which really mattered. Watching and repeating the things we see was the duo that brought us from the darkness of the Stone Age to the lights of our modern society. Evolution was never easy and don’t expect your business to transform itself over night and accomplish your deepest dreams. But keeping too much focus on how and what others are doing is counterproductive. Gather yourself from the contemplative state that is draining all your energy and start making active steps, even if those are just to replicate something you seen. Every great artist eventually stole a bit of inspiration from its predecessors or contemporary rivals.