Not everybody owns their own business, but those that do are faced with the unique prospect of being in control of their own financial future. Sure, some things remain beyond your control, but as an entrepreneur, you can control your financial successes through sound business strategies that will help your budding company to grow. The business strategies won’t work for everyone, but they are proven guidelines that can help point you in the direction of business success, and set you on the path to being a one percenter.
Make Data-Based Decisions
As a business owner, you’re faced with decisions every single day. If you want your business to flourish and to make really big money, whenever possible, you need to be making those decisions based on hard data. If you’re thinking about launching a new product, don’t just jump into it because you feel good about it.
Survey your customer base and see if they’d be interested in a product like the one you have in mind. Do some research and see what similar products other companies are making. Create some prototypes and test them with a focus group. Once you have data to support the mass creation and marketing of your new product, only then should you decide to proceed.
The same idea applies to any aspect of your business. If you can gather data about it, you should be doing so. And you should be using that data to make your daily business decisions. This habit is more likely to lead to success than making arbitrary decisions based on your gut feelings.
Imitate Others’ Successes
No, you shouldn’t be a carbon copy of someone else’s business. That’s certainly not a recipe for success. But what you should be doing is looking for ways to learn from and imitate the strategies of other successful businesses. So take a look around you and see who in your industry is doing well. Then, take some time to study how they work.
What is their online presence like? How have they branded their business? Are they targeting the same demographic as you or a different one, and how is that working to their advantage? As you make note of their business strategies, think of how you can implement similar patterns into your own business, and how that would impact your current business model.
By learning from other small business’s successes, you’ll take out a lot of trial-and-error that could cost your company a lot of money.
Keep Asking Questions
Settling for the status quo never made anyone a one percenter. If you want your business to grow and provide you with a high profit margin, you need to always be asking questions—of yourself and of your customers—to learn how you can grow and improve. Entrepreneur Sam Ovens started his first business endeavor by asking the right questions, which led him to create a highly successful app.
He started by asking himself what customer base to target. He looked for industries that were growing (hiring frequently), and landed on the real estate industry—more specifically, property managers. Then, he reached out to a group of those property managers and asked them what pain points they had with their jobs. Through their responses, he was able to learn about a common pain point—managing handwritten notes and photos of properties for their clients—and address it through the development of his app, SnapInspect.
Asking the right questions can lead to new product ideas, improved workflow processes, lower production costs, and a number of other outcomes that will help your business thrive. By doing this, and following the other tips, you just might find the level of success that can turn you into a one percenter.