Tips on Growing a Successful Business

1. Get Organized

To be successful in business you need to be organized. Organization will help you complete tasks and stay on top of things to be done. A good way to do this is to create a to-do list each day. As you complete each item, check it off your list. This will ensure that you're not forgetting anything and you're completing all the tasks that are essential to the survival of your business.

2. Keep Detailed Records

All successful businesses keep detailed records. By keeping detailed records, you'll know where the business stands financially and what potential challenges you could be facing. Just knowing this gives you time to create strategies to overcome those challenges. 

3. Analyze Your Competition

Competition breeds the best results. To be successful, you can't be afraid to study and learn from your competitors. After all, they may be doing something right that you can implement in your business to make more money.

4. Understand the Risks and Rewards

The key to being successful is taking calculated risks to help your business grow. A good question to ask is "What's the downside?" If you can answer this question, then you know what the worst-case scenario is. This knowledge will allow you to take the kinds of calculated risks that can generate tremendous rewards.

5. Be Creative

Always be looking for ways to improve your business and to make it stand out from the competition. Recognize that you don't know everything and be open to new ideas and new approaches to your business. 

6. Stay Focused

The old saying, "Rome was not built in a day," applies here. Just because you open a business doesn't mean you're going to immediately start making money. It takes time to let people know who you are, so stay focused on achieving your short-term goals.

7. Prepare to Make Sacrifices

The lead-up to starting a successful business is hard work, but after you open your doors, your work has just begun. In many cases, you have to put in more time than you would if you were working for someone else, which may mean spending less time with family and friends to be successful.

8. Be Fearless

Want to know why becoming successful in a business venture is considered such a daunting feat by society? While there are obvious hurdles to face, one of the biggest challenges is in overcoming the fear of jumping into a business in the first place. Most people dream all day about launching a successful business while watching the clock tick at their mundane day jobs. The reason they never quit the security of a paycheck is because they are too scared by the unknown that comes with starting a business. If you want to separate yourself from that crowd, you need to learn how to manage your own fears. Don't worry, you're not alone. When I quit my job to start my business, I was making double my salary outside my day job than I was inside working my eight hour job. I still had that huge fear of failure.

However, this is only the beginning of the road for those who want to be truly successful in business. Overcoming your fears and getting started is noble, but the true tests of a fearless entrepreneur will be constant, from initiating a conversation at a networking mixer, asking for the sale on a major deal, severing ties with a partner who is causing harm to the venture, and perhaps the most frightening of all situations - watching a business fail (it happened to Henry Ford twice before he designed his famous assembly line!) One who can fail miserably and not be scared to dust themselves off and try again and again until they are successful is truly fearless.

9. Understand Finance

Now, people all the time will talk about how a well known business brand started at one time in someone's basement or garage, so much that it's become a romantic notion of sorts that going from rags-to-riches is what really identifies a true entrepreneur. The reality of most successful businesses ventures couldn't be farther from the truth - if you want to make it, you're going to need money. However, that doesn't necessarily mean you need to have a lot of it when you're just getting started, but more importantly understanding how finance works and how to use your money to grow in the smartest way.

Robert Kiyosaki is most famous for teaching the world about the importance in how financial literacy plays such a crucial role in the lives of successful entrepreneurs. Those who live from paycheck to paycheck are also those that fill their lives with liabilities - car and house payments, credit cards, and other materialistic things that cost them money. Those who are financially literate, however, understand the importance of building assets - things that makethem money instead. Once you start having a positive asset column, you can then learn how to make even more money through investing. To be a successful entrepreneur you need to know how to take money and make it work for you.

10. Grow As A Leader

Once you harness your fears and make the leap to starting a business, you've already begun the journey of becoming a leader. As we'll discuss shortly, your ultimate success will have a lot to do with how you help others find their own. Many of us hold successful entrepreneurs on a pedestal much like football fans hold a star quarterback or wide receiver in high regard. However, there's always a team that these individuals lead that ultimately leads to their success. You must learn how to be a leader on some kind of level in order to motivate others to join you in your venture, believe in what you preach, or give you money for a product or service that you offer.

Just because you need to possess leadership qualities does not mean that everybody successful in business has to be the CEO, face of the company, or person "in charge". When Google started to really grow, the company's founders brought in a successful CEO in Eric Schmidt to come in and run their company - they were engineers, not CEO's. The ability to lead a team or lead the masses can sometimes come down to just having the right charisma and message to get the right people to do the things that need to be done in order for the entire thing to just work. A great soldier may be good at leading troops on the field, but not managing the entire war. An amazing product designer may also be a lousy salesperson. But a great leader will discover what they do best and where their weakness lies, and know who to put where in order to ensure that their company is one that achieves real success.