Lessons We Have Learnt (and some we are still Learning) About Business
Owning and running your own business can be fun. It can be incredibly rewarding and very interesting. To many hardworking entrepreneurs, it can also be extremely lucrative. But along the bumpy ride of owning your business there are many lessons to be learned. Some we have, and some we have not. Here are a few of our favorites.
– The amount of “supporters” you have rooting for you doesn’t mean you’ll be successful. For us, we have many people in our corner, and although we have done some wonderful things, we are nowhere near where we want to be yet in terms of business success.
– Sometimes your hard work and best efforts just aren’t enough. Plain and simple. It totally sucks too.
– Businesses and people that appear to have had an “overnight success” usually have been working at it for a very long time. Believing in themselves when no one else did. Working long hours for little or no pay. Working everyday, even when they don’t want to. There is no such thing as an overnight success. It’s just one of those business myths floating around.
– You have to make some mistakes along the way in order to succeed. When we first started there were so many things we did wrong. Some of our mistakes included not getting our business license right away, pricing our products to low, not advertising correctly and not valuing what we do enough. But as we grew in the business sense, so did our confidence. If we hadn’t made some of those mistakes, our path could have been a lot different.
– You have to keep trying. Even when you don’t want to. On your worst days you have to keep plugging away at it, as that’s how you achieve real success. In our experiences, it’s how you pick yourself up after a fall that sets you apart from the competition, not whether or not you fall.
– Life isn’t fair! Bad stuff happens to great people. Sometimes your competition wins. It is what it is. Accept it and move on.
– Don’t underestimate accountability. Generally people will forgive and forget if you just apologize. When we have messed up with a customer, it has always been more beneficial for us to just admit our “wrongs” and fix the problem. We don’t like excuses and neither do our customers.
– The most rewarding things we have experienced are the ones we have fought the hardest for. That pertains to life in general. You want big rewards; you need to take big risks. It’s that easy!
These are some of the lessons we have learnt and are still learning today. What lessons are you learning?
