10 Business Habits to Master As a Small Business Owner

Every day, thousands of new small businesses succeed while thousands of other new small businesses fail. Have you ever wondered what that one thing is that seems to separate the winners from the losers? In most cases, it boils down to the person in charge.

It’s important to remember there are a lot of reasons why businesses fail. It could be anything from bad decision-making to bad timing or luck. When it comes to a small business succeeding, it usually happens because of the powers to behave all of the right attributes of a good small business owner. In other words, they have the right business habits needed to keep their companies moving forward.

As you contemplate starting your own small business, you certainly want and expect to succeed. In an effort to instill within you the right attributes, we offer you the following 10 business habits that are very common among successful small business owners.

1. Spot and Seize Opportunities

An astute entrepreneur will always be looking for opportunities. They already know that successful small businesses are the ones that can provide goods or services that people want and need. What these people seem to have is the intuition to know when something is needed before the consumers even know they want or need it. The smart entrepreneur will spot these opportunities and immediately seize the opportunity to start fulfilling these wants and needs.

2. Proceed With Confidence

Good small business owners never lack confidence. They have a vision, and they pursue that vision without hesitating. Here’s the thing. Their confidence is usually so high that they have no doubts they will succeed. It’s not an issue of them being cocky. They simply carry with them the confidence they need to succeed because they know they will in the end.

3. Know How to Execute a Plan

Every new business owner needs to start with a business plan. The plan needs to include a proposed service or good, time allocations, and funding resources. Here’s the catch. Just because a new small business owner has a plan doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to execute that plan. A truly good entrepreneur instinctively knows how to incrementally carry out a plan without skipping steps along the way.

4. Not Afraid to Ask for Help

Good business people are smart enough to know they don’t know everything. It takes a bit of courage for a confident new small business owner to admit they are going to need advice or help from someone that has real experience like Scaling Partners. They can help you to bridge the knowledge, process, and funding gaps in your business. They have enough experience to bring your small business to the next level, so you won’t have to worry ever again. This ability to ask for the right help at the right time has served as the key to a lot of small businesses succeeding when they might have otherwise failed.

5. Flexible

Even with a plan in place, good business owners are well aware that not everything is going to progress according to plan. A good business owner will actually anticipate problems along the way. By remaining flexible when things go awry, these are people who can usually right the ship before it gets too far off course.

6. Not Afraid to Fail

An astute entrepreneur will always recognize that failure is a possibility. What they don’t do is worry about failing. They seem to have this innate ability to recognize that the only way to succeed is to also risk failure. When they do fail, they puck themselves up and try again because they know they are on the right track and just need to keep pushing forward.

7. Good Team Leaders

Leadership is the cornerstone of any business whether it be big or small. Successful small business owners know how to create a team of people where everyone slots into a particular role. From there, they have the ability to instill belief and confidence in what the business owner is trying to accomplish.

8. They Know How to Delegate

Every new business owner faces time constraints. They only have so many hours a day they can devote to making the business a success. Knowing this, they recognize that they will need to enlist the services of other people to whom they can delegate responsibilities. This frees them up to handle the responsibilities with which they should be most concerned.

9. They Dream Big

Successful small businesses always start with the biggest of dreams. The entrepreneur with big dreams seems to instinctively know that if someone is willing to shoot for the stars, the likelihood they will make it at least to the moon increases.

10. Investing in Annuities

Smart business people recognize that a business will fail if they don’t keep financial resources for future activities. For the entrepreneur who wants to invest some of the company’s money where it is safe and secure, an annuity is a good investment choice. An annuity allows the business owner to make payments to an insurance company that will keep the principal secure. When the time comes to pull out distributions, the insurance company is obligated to make such payments as prescribed in the annuity contract. The returns aren’t big, but the investment is very secure.