Aim to be an A-level business
An A-level business has as its primary motivation love for God and our fellowmen. They define their business in terms of customer’s needs. Of necessity, the secondary motivation is to earn a living. If they could, they would render services at no cost to help someone.
Among the characteristics of this type of business are:
- A sincere endeavor to help.
- Superior customer service.
- Products and services of the highest quality.
They also feel a community responsibility beyond individual agency or rights and customer demands. These companies don’t work for mankind, but they exist for mankind.
What do you need to start a business?
Customers
Everything you need to start a business is customers. You sell your ideas and products, customers pay money for your ideas and products, and then you use that money to have more ideas and produce more products. That’s how a business grows, maybe slowly but steadily. You don’t need anything else. Customers even help you to generate ideas by presenting you with new problems.
Note: A customer pays for products or services received and nothing more. A customer is not someone who asks for free samples, co-partnerships, etc.
Little Money
Little money might be a blessing. Lacking enough money forces you to be resourceful and generate ideas that grow your business. It also helps you be humble and accept to do things otherwise you would have refused to do to please your customers.
Multiple great ideas
Never build a business based on only one single great idea. You will need lots of them, so be confident you will have a lot of great ideas.
Good people
Surround yourself with good people. Pick a partner that complements you and is more intelligent than you, if possible. Have a supporting family.
Other business tips
Loyalty and honesty are traits worth keeping over other skills.
Keeping an environment of high values and ethics will attract the best people, and you want the best people in your company.
When you receive someone’s money, prepare for pain. You won’t be free of it until you return that money with interest or increase.
You need to put and make others put “skin” in the business. Whether it’s time, effort, money, sacrifices, or something else, this will help that everybody is aligned and works toward the business’s success.
In business, it’s guaranteed that dishonest behavior will come out, so never do anything like that. Always be honest in your dealings.
It’s crucial to succeed to have technical skills and a deep understanding of consumer expectations.
Everybody is special and accountable to one another. After all, we are human beings connected inseparably.
There is a form of empathy required to interact with others. Remember that you are dealing with human beings all the time, so it’s your responsibility to understand what is really the connection. Understand what is the driving force behind their motivation, what energizes and excites them, and how you can help and be reliable for them. Be punctual, responsive, and detail-oriented. Ensure that they are well served and where they are is well attended. That is the center of any successful businessperson.
Always ask yourself, who cares exactly and why? Who are these people, and what exactly are they going through in their lives? What are the real what’s for them? What is keeping these people up at night, or what is the real problem you are solving there? How are you really interacting with that person’s or organization’s daily struggles, and what are the complexities of how that person or organization operates that you need to understand deeply? Ask these questions instead of why I am special or why my business is unique. It will prevent you from creating something that doesn’t help anyone. Also, it might keep you on the right side of this thin line between someone who’s passionately committed to a brilliant vision and someone who’s insanely obsessed with a figment of his own imagination. Whether you need to sell to individual consumers, corporate buyers, or a complex bureaucracy is irrelevant. All of them have reasons that motivate buying.
Anytime you are trying to bring to market something disruptive, you, by definition, want to break the rules. The question is just how far you are with it and whether the market is ready to accept it. You always want to push yourself just to that edge of breaking enough rules to show your customers what they should want but, at the same time, not being so dense that you are failing to listen to the feedback from the market.