Published on February 12th, 2019 | by Sunit Nandi

Essential Attitudes to Have for Small Businesses to Thrive

Small businesses are the backbone of America. You hear politicians say this a lot, but the numbers don’t lie: around 50% of the American GDP is generated by the more than 27 million small businesses around the country. The success of your small business doesn’t just mean profit for you, it profits the country. But to succeed, you need to put yourself in the right mindset.

Having the right attitude to approaching business is just as important as the technology you use and your actionable skills.

Leadership, Planning, and Communication

A ship is only as good as the captain that runs it, and it’s the same in business: as the captain of your small business, you need to be able to lead your team through thick and thin. Remember: be a leader, not a boss. In a recent survey by Gallup, they found that more than 1 million employees around the country cite bad bosses and incompetent managers as the number 1 reason for leaving their jobs.

Leadership is a tricky thing; it requires displaying vision, tempering passion with foresight, unshakeable focus, the humility to accept criticism, and many others. One of the best ways to show these to the people you’re leading? Proper planning and communication.

Invest in learning more about effective ways of planning and augment this knowledge with the right technology. Familiarize yourself with effective project management processes like Kanban or Six Sigma. Once the entire team has mastered these methodologies, keep then connected to each other via apps and programs like small business PBX, Wrike, or Trello. This ensures that information is passed freely between team members and encourages collaboration.

Learning About Your Industry

Knowledge is power, and the more you know about your business, the more effective you can run it. This means studying up on the industry: how your competitors run their company, how you can do better, what your customers like, what they don’t like, and so on and so forth. There’s no harm in taking time out of your busy schedule to educate yourself about your industry and in proper business management.

This is where data analytics comes in. Fortunately, you don’t need teams of specialists pouring over terabytes of data everyday; there are various data analytic programs available to small business, with social media platforms like Facebook having their own native programs that show businesses basic information about the reach of their online presence.

Invest in this by learning how to use it and applying what you’ve learned from them in your marketing efforts. Not only does this help you create relevant materials for your customers, it will also help your business reach more people.

Placing Your Customers First

In this age of customer-centric marketing, there really is no excuse to place the needs of your customers first. This doesn’t necessarily mean selling out your core values, but it does mean that your business must work hard in creating products, services, and marketing efforts that add value to the life of your customer base. This means instilling a sense of trustworthiness in your customers by the way you do business, the reliability of your products and services, and approaching each and every customer interaction with a smile.

It’s not just about a higher ethical mission: almost 60% of people in the country are willing to try out the product or service of a new brand if it meant receiving excellent customer service. What’s more, studies have found that it’s 14 times easier to sell to an existing satisfied customer than it is to sell to a new customer. If you want to drive up your profits, you need to focus on building a base of loyal customers that will not only provide you with repeat business, but also increase your visibility and positive perception via word of mouth.

Market Properly

Nothing sinks a business faster than bad marketing. At worst, the wrong kind of marketing, small businesses will fail well before they can make a return of their investment. At best, they might make ROI, but not progress or make profit beyond that.

Proper marketing is essential in the survival of any business, be it digital, traditional, or word of mouth. Of course, with most of the world now conducting most of their businesses online, a digital marketing campaign would probably be the most effective effort you could do for your small business. But of course, this also depends on the kind of customers you have. Get to know who you’re doing business with, the kind of people you want to reach, and proceed from there.

While you could do digital marketing on your own, there are many digital marketing agencies out there that could do the job for you, and do it better. However, depending on the size of your business, you could take seminars and classes on how to do it yourself. This saves you money in hiring an agency and you get to learn something new.

Develop these attitudes and you’ll find yourself generating profit, creating happy employees, and serving a customer base that gets larger and larger as time goes on.

Tags: attitudes, essential, small business, thrive

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.