Will your business succeed or fail in 2015? A business does not succeed or fail without indicators that either is going to happen.
Success is a result of consistent efforts to grow your business, lay a foundation, and gain visibility for your products and services, as well as generating leads and doing what you can to convert the leads to sales.
3 Steps to More Business
- Consistently position your expertise in front of your market. You can do this with article marketing, blogging, interviews, joint venture partnerships, networking meetings, speaking at conferences and being featured on telesummits and hangouts.
- Keep in touch with your current client base. Much of this can be automated, but don’t fail to utilize tried and true methods, such as phone calls.
- Follow up on leads. This is huge. It’s amazing how many people gather business cards and never do a thing with them. Something as simple as picking up the phone, as a follow up to getting a business card, can do wonders.
3 Steps to Assuring Failure
Failure, on the other hand, is the result of either not taking necessary steps on a consistent basis or doing things that are underhanded, not productive or downright slimy.
It never ceases to amaze me when someone is headed for disaster and then when their business collapses they act surprised. There are often very good indicators someone is headed for trouble.
- BSOS – By now, virtually everyone is familiar with BSOS – bright shiny object syndrome. This is what is causing major distractions for so many budding entrepreneurs. Avoid getting sucked up by every new offer that comes along. If you have programs you’ve purchased, books that are waiting to be read, or files in the “to be done” area of your computer, take time to complete these before jumping into something else that “you just have to have” that will further clog your mind with the “shoot, someday I’ll get around to that” conversation.
- Not fulfilling agreements – This is a huge problem for some people. It goes something like this… You invest in ongoing services, agree to make payments and then stop payments simply because you changed your mind. In most cases, you will have signed a contract for the services. To stop payments is actually a breach of contract. This could be grounds for your account to be sent to collections. Bottom line, bad juju.
- Hanging out with the wrong people. Jim Rohn said: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” It took me a long time to fully understand this, but when I joined high-end mastermind groups with high-achieving entrepreneurs, I completely understood what this meant. The fact is, successful people think differently from those who are destined to fail. Who are you hanging out with? If you’re the big fish in a little pond, it may be time to change the pond.
The bottom line is this; you are responsible for your bottom line. The choices you make on a daily basis say more about where you are headed that just about anything else. What choices are you making moving into the coming year?
What do you do to assure your success and avoid failure? Comments welcomed and encouraged.
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