My top 6 Suggestions to run your own Business

1. Commitment: - Yes…..!! I know this may sound a bit lame and obvious but without it you will fail. Along with commitment comes patience, there will be many occasions when the phone doesn’t ring and you email inbox becomes a ghost town. I started my first business in October 2008, the news was dominated by the credit crunch and I wasn’t even convinced my phone even had a ring tone as it never made a noise until February 2009.
2. Have a Plan: - No not a business plan, a business plan is fiction transcript that you write to keep the bank happy. What I mean by a plan is a vision of the future, have a picture in your mind of what your business will look like in a year from now. You need to visualize what it looks like to make it tangible, you need to have a direction at the start of your journey. To put this into laymen terms, you never get in your car and just drive to see where you end up, you’ll have a destination in your mind before you leave, sometimes you may have to change direction but eventually you will complete your journey.
3. Never have an opinion: - The only opinion that matters is the ones your customers or clients have. Your customers and clients are always right even when you believe they are wrong.
4. Self-educate:- What you don’t know now….learn. Take the time to learn new skills. Since we started in October 2008 we have learned to build our own websites and studied professional marketing, saving us £.000′s on out-sourcing.
5. Belief and faith: - This for me is the most important discipline; there is only one thing in life that you have total control over, your own thoughts. If you don’t believe in your business how can you expect anybody else too?
6. Diversity: - be prepared to change direction, if things aren’t working just working harder isn’t enough, you’ll just get nowhere quicker. To achieve a different outcome you will need to change the way you do things