The habits of top businesspeople

James Whitcomb Riley once said: “Continuous, unflagging effort, persistence and determination will win. Let not the man be discouraged who has these.” Everything that happens in life is a matter of probabilities.

Brian Tracy believes that most self-made millionaires are usually entrepreneurs, business executives or self-employed professionals. By becoming knowledgeable, proficient and skilled in the operations of successful business, you dramatically increase the probability that you will earn a lot of money, achieve financial independence yourself in the years ahead. As it happens, all business skills and behaviours are learnable through study and practice.

The Purpose of a Business

What is the purpose of a business? Some people say that it is to “make a profit.” However, Peter Drucker says that, “The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” All profits are a result of creating and keeping a sufficient number of customers and serving them in a profitable manner.

The most important habit you can develop for business success is the habit of thinking about your customers all the time. Develop an intense customer focus. Put yourself inside their hearts and minds, and see everything you do from the customer’s point of view. Always you must develop the habit of placing your customers in the center of your thinking in all of your business activities.

The aim of all business activities is customer satisfaction. Businesses succeed and grow because they satisfy their customers better than their competitors. Businesses shrink and decline because they fail to satisfy their customers with the products and services they want, at prices they are willing to pay. To be sure that you are doing the right things, one of the most important questions you ever ask is, “What does my customer consider value?”

The Power of Clarity

Perhaps the most important word in business and personal success is the word “clarity.” You must be absolutely clear about who you are as a person, and what you are trying to do or accomplish in your business or work. You must develop the habit of thinking carefully about every detail of your business life, and then take the time to achieve absolute clarity in several different areas.

Begin with your vision. What is your vision for your ideal business future? In the Bible, it says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” In business terms, this means that where there is no clear, positive, uplifting vision for the business, people eventually lose their enthusiasm and commitment and simply go through the motions of operating the business day by day.

Just as you need an uplifting and inspiring vision for yourself and your life, you need a vision for your business. Make it a habit to continually define and clarity this picture. Practice “idealization” in the creation of this vision. Imagine that you have no limitations and that you can create your business any way you want.

A Mission and a Measure

What is your mission for your business? A mission is always defined in terms of what you want to accomplish with your business for your customers. A mission always contains a measure of some kind, that you can use to determine whether or not your mission has been completed.

Why you do what you do. What is your purpose for your business? The definition of purpose answers the question of “why” you are in business in the first place. What is it that you passionately want to achieve for your customers? What results do you want to get? In what ways is your business organized to improve the life of your customers in some way? Why are you doing what you are doing in the first place? The greater clarity you have with regard to your purpose, the better organized and the more efficient will be your entire business.

Set Clear Goals and Objectives

Once you are clear about your vision, mission and purpose, you define them in terms of specific, measurable, time bounded business goals. Your goals are the short-term, medium-term and long-term objectives that you need to reach for your business to be successful.

You need goals for how much you intend to sell and for how much you intend to earn on those sales. You need goals for the development and introduction of new products and services, and the improvement of existing ones. You need goals for the types of people that you want to attract and hire. You need goals for the markets you intend to enter, and the amounts you intend to sell in those markets. Developing the habit of clarity about your goals gives each person in your business, and yourself, specific targets to aim at every single day.

Fortunately, in business, all goals and objectives can be expressed in financial terms. Whatever you do in your business, you can create or determine a specific financial number to aim at that will tell you whether or not you are successful. Develop the habit of thinking in financial terms, and thinking in terms of net profits, at every stage of your business.

Focus on Marketing and Sales

Every business is essentially a marketing organization. Drucker says that the role of the manager is to innovate and market, because these are the only two activities that create and keep customers, and ultimately generate financial results. Surprisingly enough, most managers spend much of their time on activities that do not involve innovation and marketing.

It is important for you to develop the habit of thinking about marketing and sales results most of the time. Think about your customers most of the time. Think about the things that you could do, every single day, to make your products and services more attractive to more customers.

When Tracy consults with companies on their marketing, he encourages them to establish a basic mission for their sales activities. One of the best overall missions is this: “Our mission is to get our customers to buy from us rather than from our competitors, to buy again because they are highly satisfied with their initial purchase, and then to tell and bring their friends to buy from us as well.”

The Customer Is “King”

Today in our society, the customer is king, or queen. The customer decides our success or failure. The customer determines our level of growth or decline. Satisfying our customers must be the central focus and habitual way of thinking of every person in the organization. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, once said, “We all have one boss, the customer. And she can fire us any time she wants by simply deciding to shop somewhere else.”

Customers buy just one thing: improvement. The reason that a customer buys from you is to improve his or her life or work in some way. Your job as a business person is to convince your prospect that they will be better off by buying your product or service from you, than they would from buying it from anyone else.

The customer is always right. If the customer does not buy from you, or even worse, buys from your competitor, it is because in the customer’s perception, your offerings are not attractive enough to induce the buying decision. For this reason, you must develop the “outside in” habit of dealing with your customers. You must continually look at your products and services, and what you offer, from the outside. You must see yourself through the eyes of your customers, so that you can make whatever changes are necessary to cause your customer to prefer buying from you rather than from someone else.

The most successful entrepreneurs develop the habit of intense market and customer orientation. They focus single-mindedly on their customers and think continually about the different ways that they can please and satisfy them even more than before. Whether you start your own business, or work for another business, your intense focus on your customers will do more to assure your success than any other habit you can develop in business.

BY CAPT. SAM ADDAIH
(RTD)

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