Seven Formulas For Business Success

Visualize Your Goals

There are seven formulas for business success. Number one, set a specific goal and visualize it as a reality. Play the picture of your goal as already realized on the screen of your mind over and over again. Number two, look for a problem you can solve with a product or service that is high quality and good value. All successful businesses are based on products or services that are high quality and good value. Number three, start small and learn your business thoroughly. Be patient. Invest time rather than a lot of money.

Bootstrap Your Way To Success

One of the best ways to build a business is to start off on a bootstrap. This means that you start off with very little money and you grow your business with the money that you ear n in the business, rather than outside financing, borrowing, loans from friends and so on.

Test, Test, Test

Number four, test every major move before you invest in it. Test, test, test. Don't plunge into a business. Move ahead carefully, one step at a time. Number five, expand on the basis of your successes, out of your profits, as you move along. In other words, only expand your business on money that you've earned in the business, not on borrowed capital.

Pick Your People Carefully

Number six, carefully select the people to help you expand and grow. The biggest mistakes you'll ever make will be in picking the wrong people to work with, so be very, very careful in picking the people you're going to work within your business.

Use Financial Leverage

And number seven, use financial leverage. Financial leverage is business borrowing, lines of credit from the bank, which are based on the ca h flow from your successful business. The whole aim of starting a business is to develop a consistent, predictable source of cash flow in excess of cost and expenses and then to hold to the money. Banks will lend you all the money that you can service as debt with your cash flow.

Start Off Part Time

One final thing that you can do, and I've recommended that many people do this over the years, is if you're starting off with no money, go to work part-time for a business in a field that interests you. It's a great form of on-the-job training. Work evenings or work weekends. Or work on your holidays if you like. Sometimes a business that looks big from the outside will look terrible once you start working for it. But sometimes when you start working for a business, you start to get a great understanding of how it works and you get insights on how you can improve it.

Learn What You Need To Learn

Remember this, though, most businesses fail because of manager incompetence. So take the time to learn what you need to know to succeed. Be patient. The time you invest before you start will pay off over and over again in the months and years ahead.

Action Exercise

Here are two things you can do immediately to implement these formulas for business success:
First, be prepared. The number one reason that people succeed in starting their own businesses is that they have the knowledge and experience, in advance that they need to succeed. Do your homework.
Second, start small. Some people think that they can be successful faster by putting all their money up front at the very beginning. The opposite is true. Start small and grow out of your cash flow from successful operations.

Transformational Leadership

Advancing Your Career

As your career advances, you move along the scale from employee, to supervisor to manager and finally, to leader. Managers, and some leaders, engage in what is called transactional leadership, the deployment and management of people and resources to get results.

Arouse Emotion In Others

However, at the highest end of the leadership scale, we come to what is called "transformational leadership." Transformational leadership is defined as leadership that arouses emotion, that taps into the emotional and spiritual resources of an organization. Transformational leadership empowers people to greatly exceed their previous levels of accomplishment.

Make People Feel Terrific

Empowerment is the key. Transformational leaders are those who can elicit extraordinary performance from ordinary men and women. The superior leader is like a catalyst in a chemical process that causes the other ingredients to work together in a superior fashion.

Key Function of Leadership

Empowerment as a key function of leadership becomes even more important as the work force becomes dominated by members of the Generation X. These highly individualistic men and women are increasingly seeking higher meaning and purpose in their careers. They are not impressed by authority or hierarchy. If they don't get the satisfaction they are seeking from their work, they will go somewhere else. And the better they are at what they do, the more readily they will leave one job for another.

Provide the Emotional Glue

Transactional leadership is essential to getting the job done but transformational leadership is what provides the emotional glue that causes organizations and the people in them to excel.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to become a transformational leader and empower your people.
First, get excited about your work. The more excited and committed you are to your work, the more excited and committed will be the people around you. The leader always sets the tone for the department or organization.
Second, continually encourage and praise the people who work for you. The better you make people feel about themselves and their work, the more empowered they will feel and the more committed they will be to your company.