You need to know WHY you started your business in the first place. Was it money… Lifestyle… or did you think you wanted to change the world. It's critical to know why you started and what you want from the business. This is the only way you are going to have something to fall back on when the tough times hit. You need a stronger why than the problems in front of you. If your why isn’t strong enough… you will fail because you will quit.
You need to understand that you DON’T have all the answers. If you haven’t run a successful business before – You don’t know what you’re doing! You are going to make mistakes and you are going to fail… you’re going to fail a LOT. If you want to accelerate your growth… if you want to skip most of the mistakes you are going to make… if you want to learn from other people’s mistakes instead of your own and save a lot of time and money… you need a coach to help you. You need someone 10 steps ahead of you who can tell you where you’re going wrong and help you avoid the problems that are going to come up. You need a business coach. Without that… you're dragging out the time it will take… increasing the money it will cost and slowing down the learning of the lessons you need to go through to be successful.
You need to find out the WHY. Why should anybody buy your product from you? Why are you different? Why are you unique? Why are you better? Why does anyone care? Unless you figure this out your company is just another dime a dozen company with a product or service that your customers can get anywhere. If there isn’t a compelling reason to buy from you… you will never scale and you will always be fighting to keep what you currently have.
This is a big one. You need to check your ego and figure out who YOU are in your business. You also need to figure out who you are NOT. You may not be the best CEO. You may not be the Entrepreneur. You might be the specialist. You might be the salesperson. You might be the manager. Who are you? Who do you need to bring into the company if you’re going to scale and grow? This is a tough one and requires you as the owner to check your ego and get the help you need.
You need to understand your numbers. You need basic accounting knowledge. You need to understand the core metrics in your P&L statement. You need to understand the difference between profit and cashflow. You need to be able to look at your numbers and understand historical pattern recognition. You don’t need to be a bookkeeper… you can hire someone to do that. But you do need to understand what they are telling you and be able to read the data and use it to make decisions in your company. If you don’t know your numbers. You will fail.
