First Step Marketing

One of the biggest risks in running a business is that you will simply run out of time: time to complete a particular project, a time frame in which you have projected that your business would begin to show a profit, time to keep up with the often insurmountable paperwork. In the jam-packed days that most Americans put up with today, time is the most precious natural resource you have. And an entrepreneur who may have started a business against the advice of family and friends who think he’s crazy for walking away from the security of a steady job is perennially aware of the ticking of the clock, especially if he’s been given a deadline to succeed or shut the business down.

Frequently, a business owner is tempted to cut corners in order to fit everything in under the deadline. Some may accomplish this by cutting corners on quality or service, or by saying yes to every project that comes in the door, even though they wouldn’t be able to get everything done if they worked twenty hours a day, seven days a week. If you feel yourself careening in this direction, the first thing you should do is to stop for a few minutes and take a deep breath. Try to clear your mind, and then focus on the context of the deadline as well as the overall picture of your business. Consider that this is only one—or even the first— of many deadlines you will have to meet over the course of a long, fruitful business career. Keeping your perspective is essential to running a growing and healthy business.

This next piece of advice is the single most important lesson you can learn, especially if your business requires you to adhere to strict deadlines: Train yourself to allow 10 to 20 percent more time to complete a project than you normally would budget. This goes against an entrepreneur’s natural tendencies, where she’s usually rushing around at breakneck speed all the time, trying to do ten things at once.

Where there are great risks you must take, there are also significant rewards. In time, the monetary reward that comes from being a successful entrepreneur can be sizable. But time and again, most successful business owners cite the psychic rewards as being far more satisfying than any financial rewards they have reaped.

In fact, once you become an entrepreneur one of these intangible rewards may come sooner than you imagined. Not long after your business starts to have some degree of visibility in your community and your industry, people will come looking to you for advice. Since you were able to succeed in business after such a short time—forget about the fact that you’ve just survived your most chaotic day as an entrepreneur yet—you are an expert in their eyes.

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A Matter of Time

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 3:56 am and is filed under Business Management, Business Plans, Career Management, Home Based Business, financial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.