When you’re in the midst of business difficulties, you may feel like you’re the only one struggling for survival. Why is it that others around you can achieve success while you’re floundering around just trying to stay afloat? Here are five key things that you may be doing to limit or prevent your own success:

(1) Demanding, instead of striving for, perfection

It’s all well and good to aim for excellence, but not at the expense of everything else. Of course, you absolutely can’t allow yourself to earn a reputation for shoddy work – there needs to be a happy medium.

If you want to become successful, your attention should be on what success, not necessarily perfection, looks like. If your focus is on being flawless, your business will suffer because output will be delayed as you over-scrutinize every minute detail. Your input costs will also soar because of the extra time and resources that impeccability demands.

Get the job done. Get it done well. Get it done better than your competitors, but it doesn’t need to be perfect. If something doesn’t go well, learn from your mistakes and move on.

(2) Underestimating the power of marketing

If you doubt the merits of marketing, then you haven’t seen it done properly. It doesn’t matter if you have little to no competition, it doesn’t matter if you need to tighten the purse strings and are looking at ways to slash costs. Every single business must promote itself in one way or another. The best thing is you can easily quantify costs and results and calculate your return on investment – a simple way to check whether your marketing efforts are working or if you need to change things up a bit.

If you’ve been putting off promotional activities until you’ve got the time and the cash, you’re creating your own hurdle. And if, in spite of not devoting the right budget to marketing costs, you’re business is doing well, you should realize that your business is indeed underperforming. Imagine where you could be with a proper marketing effort!

(3) Fear

People fear public speaking more than they fear death and so avoid situations where they may have to present themselves publicly. Similarly, many people’s business personality is driven by fear. Do you hold back, too scared to give it your all, in case… what? In case you make a mistake? In case people judge you? In case they say “No”?

Who cares? If a prospective client doesn’t take you up on your offer, move on. If you fumble your words at a networking event, consider why it happened and how you can improve next time. Don’t treat these sorts of situations as reasons not to try. No one goes through life with everything handed to them on a platter. Everyone hears “no” on their journey to success. It’s what you do in response – dust yourself off and get back into it, or retreat – that makes the difference.

(4) Isolation

Owning a business can be a lonely endeavor. One of the most valuable things you can do is to seek out like-minded people who have successfully navigated the journey before you. You’ll find that many of these people enjoy the idea of sharing their knowledge and becoming a ‘mentor’. Their advice and suggestions about both what to do, and what not to do, could be the deciding factor when it comes to your own success or failure.

(5) Failing to have and/or promote a Unique Selling Point

Unless you want to make a living selling on price, location, or convenience, you need to add something to your products and services to differentiate them. That something is a “Unique Selling Point” (USP).

A USP is what differentiates you from every other business out there. It’s what you add to the sale that makes the customer choose you over the competition. Unless there is something different, something special about what you sell, customers will tend to buy it from wherever they can get it the cheapest or easiest.

If you can add value to your product then people will be willing to pay a premium to buy it from you. This can be done by packaging your product/services so the customer sees ‘value for money’, or it could be intangible – an experience.

Demonstrating to a customer that you are selling solutions to their problems rather than just a physical good or service justifies loyalty and higher prices without having to increase your costs.

You no longer have to wonder how they – the successful businesses you wish you could emulate – do it. By taking the above advice on board and making a conscious effort to avoid these five success-limiters, you will be well on your way to joining those successful entrepreneurs you admire so much.

Roy Fisher, CPA specializes in providing accounting and tax services to small business owners and professional practices in Houston, TX. For more information, go here:
http://www.ledger-solutions.com

Roy Fisher, CPA specializes in providing accounting and tax services to small business owners and professional practices in Houston, TX. For more information, go here:
http://www.ledger-solutions.com

Author Bio: Roy Fisher, CPA specializes in providing accounting and tax services to small business owners and professional practices in Houston, TX. For more information, go here:
http://www.ledger-solutions.com

Category: Advice
Keywords: CPA advice, accounting and tax advice, outsourced accounting services, CPA business services