5 Tools You Need in Your Entrepreneurial Toolbox

Having the right tools and strategies at your disposal will help ensure your business is a successful one.

These 5 tools are often overlooked with the pressure of day-to-day operations but are essential for a growing and profitable business.

This post may contain affiliate links for your convenience. Please read my?disclosure policy here.

1. Be a Closer

Pick any successful entrepreneur you like, let’s say, Steve Jobs.

Jobs just might be the poster boy of entrepreneurialism.

Everybody knows the basic story. Jobs meets Steve Wozniak. Together they develop the Apple personal computer and the rest is history.

However, a closer look at that partnership reveals some interesting information.

Wozniak was a computer genius. He liked building things.

Jobs was not a computer genius. Instead of building things, he liked selling things.

In fact, a closer examination of Steve Jobs’ career reveals that he was a master salesman, particularly adept at knowing not only what to sell, but when to close the deal.

If you’re in business for yourself, you are a salesperson.

Your business produces a product or service.

It is your job as an entrepreneur to successfully sell that product or service.

Every successful entrepreneur understands the importance of asking for a sale.

They know that the most important element in the sales process is not marketing, lead generation or sales presentations.

The most important element in any sale is the close.

If you don’t ask for the money, you won’t get the money.

It’s that simple.

2. The Customer is Always Right

Your customers associate you with what you produce.

In a large part, they purchase what you produce because of the things you do and say.

Because you are always in the spotlight, it is easy to mistake the positive reaction your product or service receives for personal adulation.

In other words, it is easy to let your ego get out of control.

Every successful entrepreneur understands that while they may be the face and voice of their business, the business is not about them.

Instead, the business is there to satisfy its customers and to efficiently solve a problem they have been experiencing.

This means that it is what the customer wants that is important, not what the entrepreneur wants.

The needs of the entrepreneur take a back seat to the customer’s needs.

When you provide your customers with a world-class experience when it comes to service and satisfaction, both you and your business are a success.

3. Bang Your Own Drum

No matter how brilliant your product or service might be, customers are not going to come to you.

Instead, you are going to have to go after the customers.

This promotion is essential and you need to take advantage of every opportunity to get the word out about your business and what it does.

Of course, you’re going to use traditional marketing channels.

You will advertise.

You will generate leads.

You are going to have to remember that every interaction that takes place with another person throughout the average day represents a potential promotional opportunity.

This is the way that successful entrepreneurs become associated with their own brands.

People who purchase an Apple product do so, in part, to purchase a bit of the mystique of Steve Jobs.

When you bang your own drum, your audience begins to associate you with what you sell.

That association has the potential to be a fruitful one.

4. Show Me the Money

Every successful business, by definition, is going to need to grow.

Successful growth means the ability to produce more or to provide more to your customers.

In order to be truly successful, you’re going to have to evolve into something more than a one-person shop.

At some point down the road, by necessity, you will have to come up with more cash.

The money for this growth and expansion will not come solely from internal profits.

You will have to go to outside sources to obtain external funding in order to get where you want to go.

This means you not only have to know where to go and get investment funds, you’re also going to have to make a cogent argument to potential investors that your business is worth the effort as well as the risk.

As an entrepreneur, being able to successfully raise investment funding is an essential skill.

5. Networking is Life

Quite literally, networking is life for any business.

Its importance cannot be stressed enough.

It is said that who you are and how you are perceived is a result of the five people that you spend the most time with.

Therefore, while the choice of who you spend time with is entirely up to you, discretion would dictate that you consider this choice successfully.

Successful entrepreneurs choose to spend time with people who are worth the time spent.

In many ways, being an entrepreneur is a twenty-four/seven job.

You need to make every minute count.

You need to make every encounter productive.

It’s not about work as much as it is about belief or lifestyle.

Many successful entrepreneurs live for what they do.

They don’t do what they do to live.

Therefore, in many ways, they are always hustling.

This means, when it comes to networking, they surround themselves with the most valuable contacts that they can.

They understand that this type of association produces a positive symbiotic feedback loop. Everyone involved experiences growth.

Here are more tips to help you keep building your entrepreneurial skills:

• 4 Things You Must Know to be Successful in Business
• 3 Important Factors to be Successful
• From Failure to Promising Future
• 4 Strategies for Success

Interested in more ways to balance your life and your business? Join my FREE Facebook Group – Time Money & Happiness Matters!