Contrary to popular belief, building a business… growing a business… creating a successful and profitable enterprise that commands a dominating position in the marketplace, doesn’t automatically require hard work, frustration, and enormous costs.
There’s no question, and you probably won’t get much debate, that there’s more competition, and stiffer competition than ever before, in nearly industry and profession. But there’s also more opportunity.
You and I both know, that this year in this country, in the greatest and most prosperous times the world has ever known, a huge number of businesses… even large and well-established businesses, will close their doors never to do business or provide products or services to their customers again.
Some analysts say that the major reason for business failure is under-funding… a lack of capital.
Others say it’s because of poor business management practices.
And there’s another school that teaches that some businesses are started by the wrong people… that those people lack entrepreneurial skills. That they would be better off working in the business as technicians or employees, rather than trying to run the business.
But when you get right down to it, for a business to even be a business, in the first place, a business has to have customers… someone to exchange their dollars for the products and services the business sells.
You see, you can have all the funding in the world… you can have great management skills… and you can even have a tremendous entrepreneurial mindset, but unless and until you have someone to purchase your products and services in sufficient numbers, you’ll never have much of a successful business enterprise, and will only generate an average income, at best.
Now, here’s a fact:
Most businesses experience failure because they don’t have enough customers buying from them on a regular basis.
Either they don’t attract a sufficient number of new customers, or they let their existing or current customers slip away.
And it isn’t always because they don’t try. Most often, it’s a result of not understanding and implementing effective “customer-getting and customer-keeping” strategies.
The bottom line is, if you really want your business to be successful, you’ve got to make getting and keeping customers your number one priority.