Forget What You Were Told About Growing A Business And Do This Instead

The biggest misconception about entrepreneurship is that it is a bed of roses where you can one day dream up an amazing business idea, get a friend or two together, launch your enterprise, and make a lot of money.

The problem with this mirage is the reality is completely different. Your business idea is probably not going to work, the money you’ve put into the startup is probably going to go to waste, you probably have zero experience to execute what you’ve set out to do, and you may eventually end up more depressed than you already were before you started your company.

But while this reality can be really scary, successful entrepreneurs have proven over and over again that there’re a proven set of rules to start, run, and grow a successful new business, whether you’re a novice or not…

“And this is figuring out how to sell one product profitably!”

See Also: How To Build An Effective Sales Team From Scratch

Why Is This A Problem?

Making your first profitable sale is the biggest problem for most early-stage businesses. At this stage, the main problem you have is you don’t really know what you are doing. The challenge you’re facing is making the first profitable sale. And the major opportunity at this stage is achieving a minimum critical number of customers.

To make it through this stage, there are two important skills you’d need. These skills have nothing to do with knowing how to motivate people or how to manage anything. These two skills are the fundamentals every new business owner must master if they’ll scale through the first stage of their business lifecycle. And these two skills don’t care about how many years of experience you’ve got working for another company.

These Skills Are…

1. You have to know how to make a sale.
2. You have to be able to put that sales process into action.

See Also: The Difference Between Sales And Marketing

Out of all the major functions of running a business; whether operations, accounting, product development, customer service, and marketing, the one that should always be given top priority in any business is marketing.

The other functions are important, but without marketing, you will have zero sales, without sales, you will have zero cash flow, and without cash flow, you will not be able to sustain any other part of your business except you intend to borrow funds to survive.

The hard reality is that without sales, it is difficult to sustain an ongoing business.
But the moment your business is making sales and you have achieved a minimum critical number of customers, your problems, challenges, and opportunities change.

See Also: Don’t Make Any Of These 7 Dangerous Sales Mistakes!

The major problem you are now faced with is that you are just breaking even (or even losing money) and your major challenge is then to come up with other products you can sell profitably.

To achieve this, you have to change your business into a company that’s completely ruled by innovation and nothing less.

So What’s The Number One Rule Of Entrepreneurship?

The number one rule of entrepreneurship is that to make your business viable, you don’t need a fancy office, you don’t need a fancy car, you don’t need a lot of irrelevant employees, and you don’t need a fancy computer!

What you do need….. is a paying customer. And until you have that, your business will never grow, and you’ll eventually run out of money.

As the business owner, selling is your number one job, and you must dedicate the majority of your time and efforts to engaging in sales and marketing activities.

See Also: The Most Important Part Of Growing A Business No One Talks About

Some Last Words

Until you can master the art of selling, not growing a successful business despite trying, will continue to happen with every new startup you venture into.

What are your thoughts on the most important thing to know about growing a successful business? Let me know by leaving a comment below.