The biggest lesson I’ve learnt as an entrepreneur

I’m not going to make you wait to hear the biggest lesson I’ve learnt as entrepreneur, so here it is:

Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Sounds simple right, but it takes experience for that advice to really sink in. So, what do I mean?

In business, as in life, things will often go wrong (see Murphy’s Law). Not every component of your genius business strategy will fall nicely into place from day one. Your team is going to make mistakes – lots of them in fact.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have plenty of happy customers, but there will always be challenging customers – no matter what you do. Sometimes there are customers who just aren’t the right fit for your business, or your business needs to grow to meet emerging customer needs.

What’s important is that you don’t let yourself get bogged down by the day to day disappointments. To introduce a sports analogy, the best competitors take the loss and begin immediately thinking about the next game.?

If you let every adverse event affect you, there are a variety of negative effects:

• Your mental health suffers, which has flow on effects for your physical health.
• Your decision making ability is impaired because stress limits your ability to think clearly.
• Your negative energy flows onto your team, whether you think they notice or not – trust me, they do.

I hear you saying “Sounds great Jeff, but it’s easier said than done”. I know some days can be really tough but here are some pieces of advice I can offer:

1. Use challenges as an opportunity to learn and improve – It’s impossible to predict every challenge you’ll face as a business owner, so when a new difficulty presents itself, be happy that you’ve had the opportunity to improve the way you operate.
2. Recognise growth through adversity – After you’ve come through a difficult situation, take time to appraise how your team developed a solution and were able to grow – and celebrate!
3. Encourage collaboration – A problem shared is a problem halved, and this is especially true for teams. Don’t leave team members to struggle with a problem on their own if there’s an opportunity to develop a solution together that can be used in future scenarios.
4. Delegate, before it’s too late – It’s hard to relinquish control when you believe you can do everything better yourself. However, this will only create more problems down the road because you haven’t given your people opportunities to learn. Ultimately, your business will only grow as fast as your people are able to, so you need to learn to take a step back -? even when it feels uncomfortable.

Not sweating the small stuff allows you to keep your mind on the bigger picture of your business. When you’re calm and spend less time worrying about trivial problems, new ideas come to you more easily and you’re more receptive to the ideas your team members present.

These are just a few of things I’ve learnt about running a business, but I’d love to hear your advice too. Please let me know if there’s any advice you wish you could offer your younger self when you were first starting out.

About the author:

As the Founder of SocialGen, I've helped hundreds of senior marketing, sales and subject matter experts significantly increase new and existing business revenue by finding ideal prospects on social networks, conducting necessary research, sourcing and distributing content, engaging in relevant dialogue, and converting connections into measurable revenue. To learn more about how your marketing department can enable your business development teams to directly increase revenue and profits into your organisation using social media, please send me an Inmail, or get in touch on 0422 800 001.