Lastly the skills necessary to do it year after year building value and an asset, are critically important. So I’ll end my ‘series’ here on what its like to own a business. Certainly with 30 - 40% of businesses failing in their first two years of business (depending on your source but SBA has tracked this pretty consistently), if you persevere through this time period you’ve done pretty well. But there are many skills needed to truly be successful in building an asset of value that you can pass on to the next generation or sell when you go into retirement.

One key is the team you build. If you are self-employed and mostly do all the work yourself, you’ll never build an asset that can be sold. If the business still operates only when you’re there, all you are doing is trading hours for money. You may have an account list to sell and a name of a company, but no one else can do your business if you’re the only one doing it.

The other part about team is hiring. In a nutshell, hire slowly, fire quickly. If you do a good job up front of screening people, using behavioral tools to compliment the team building one that works well together, you won’t have to do much firing. But if you do, when you see its not working, you need to cut your losses with that person and move on quickly or it will have a negative effect on the good ones you want to keep.

I’ve written before about knowing your numbers but it has to be said again. Business people that are most successful absolutely know the key indicators in their business. ANY business owner can spout off their sales number. But you should know your profit margin, and conversion rates too. Do you know how many leads your marketing is generating? Your acquisition cost to get a new customer? How many times they must buy from you before they are profitable for you? And other numbers potentially unique to your business.

Another thing is how you look at customer service because a huge part of a very successful business is that their customers buy from them repeatedly. Are you ‘satisfying’ your customers? If that’s all you’re doing, watch out! One of your competitors is going way beyond that. Satisfaction should be the bear minimum a business does. I believe you need to have a “wow them” mindset. Do all you can to make them rave about you. In the long run they’ll keep coming back if you do. Repeat business is a beautiful thing. It’ll make your business a referral one where people talk about you to their friends and neighbors so often, they come in and buy from you too. That sure reduces your marketing budgets and acquisition costs.

So team, knowing your numbers, and a repeat business/referral/’wow’ customer service approach are all keys to you growing your business into a valuable asset and owning it successfully year after year.