If you are an entrepreneur, then chances are that you are a very passionate and imaginative individual with a sense of wonder and purpose that propels you forward to try new things and think outside the box. You’ve probably started a few businesses throughout your journey and have gotten better at it each time. As a seasoned entrepreneur, you’re likely to reach a turning point in your career. While you started out relying on your vision and critical thinking to launch your new ventures, as your operations grow, you will find that leadership and management skills become more important. Stepping into a role of leadership is not something that many entrepreneurs are prepared for, especially when it comes to the vast responsibilities that come with managing the strategies and success of a business, as well as developing cohesive teams required to scale and grow.
 
Whether you consider yourself a natural born leader, or you must work at some aspects of being a strategic and successful leader, with practice you can become highly skilled at running your business and your team.
While you are strengthening your leadership skills, keep in mind these essential areas:
 
Communication Skills for Entrepreneurs: 

1. Create connections. Engage your employees and develop the relationships you need internally and externally. Build a support network that enables you to seek advice, discuss ideas, and discover other points of view.
   
   
2. Ask questions. Show others that you care by taking an interest in them. Find out more about what motivates your employees and what their personal goals are. Seek help when you need it, so you can make sound decisions and benefit from the experience of others.
   
   
3. Share feedback. Ask other’s how you’re doing. They’ll appreciate your regard for their opinion, and you’ll help each other to grow.
   
   
4. Provide inspiration. Lead by example. Let your passion and purpose unite your team. Discuss your mission statement and integrate your vision with your daily actions. Use one-on-one meetings and other tools to help employees align personal and organizational goals.

 
Recruitment Skills for Entrepreneurs: 

1. Build a pipeline. Go beyond posting ads on job boards. Create a pool of qualified talent who want to work with you. Clarify your employer brand. Stay in touch with passive candidates. Cultivate internal candidates who show potential for being high performers.
   
   
2. Prioritize hiring. Trying to fill multiple positions may feel overwhelming. Streamline the process by figuring out what’s most urgent and important. Focus on openings that have firm deadlines or more impact on the bottom line. Check off positions that are easy to fill, so you can focus on those that require more specialized backgrounds.
   
   
3. Promote diversity. One advantage of starting from scratch is that you can be intentional about hiring diverse talent. Make your hiring teams and job descriptions inclusive. Encourage referrals and target sources that can help you reach a broader audience.

 
Delegation Skills for Entrepreneurs: 

1. Empower others. Reassigning routine tasks is a great way to free up your time for higher priorities. However, delegation can also be used to give employees challenging and rewarding opportunities that will help them to advance.
   
   
2. Offer training. It can be difficult to step back when you’ve invested so much of yourself in your work. Helping your employees to continue learning will enable them to take on more responsibility and increase your peace of mind.
   
   
3. Be flexible. Someone else may approach the same task in a very different way. Give others room to innovate and adapt their job to suit their strengths.

 
Other Leadership Skills for Entrepreneurs: 

1. Cultivate your image. Depending on your industry, you may be able to wear your sweatshirts to work. On the other hand, you may need to adopt a more corporate look and consider some basic PR.
   
   
2. Develop financial literacy. Treat your business like a business. At a minimum, ensure that you can read a balance sheet and income statement.
   
   
3. Master technology. Digital equipment and software are central to almost any workplace today. Keep up with the latest trends.
   
   
4. Give back. Being socially responsible can strengthen your business and make your stakeholders happier. Support worthy causes and contribute to your community.

 
Having advanced leadership skills will help you take your business very far. With enough commitment and effort, you can make the transition from solo entrepreneur to an effective leader. Remember that strong leaders make strong businesses, and weak leaders usually crumble under pressure. Take the time to truly understand your strengths and weaknesses and use them to put together a winning team that you can effectively lead to grow and scale your business successfully. If you need some guidance and support in developing your leadership skills to be able to reach your highest potential, contact us for a free consultation and start getting closer to your goals today!

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​While many believe that knowledge is power, knowledge is only powerful when it’s consistently applied. Consistency may be the most important component of success. A small step forward each day adds up to a lot of mileage over time.

Are the little things you do each day adding up to something positive? Or is the quality of your life slowly slipping away?

With consistent action over the next 10 or 20 years, what could you accomplish? Five cold calls each day / 5 days per week equal 1300 sales calls in 1 year! Five small pieces of chocolate over the same schedule is roughly 25,000 calories, or the equivalent of over 7 lbs.

Are your consistent behaviors helping or harming?

Use the power of consistency to enhance your success:

If you re-lived today for the next 10 years, where would you end up? If you saved just a small amount of money each day, you’d eventually be wealthy. If you overeat slightly each day, you’d weigh 400+ lbs.

An effective way to predict your success is to examine your average day and project the likely outcome into the future. An hour each night spent practicing the piano would give different results versus spending an extra hour watching television.

Your teeth aren’t clean because you brushed them for an hour straight. They’re clean because you brushed them for 3 minutes for 3,000 days straight.

Consider where your daily habits and behaviors are leading you financially, socially, spiritually, and physically. What are the logical conclusions of your daily activities?

Realize that many changes in life come slowly. Many success gurus advocate taking massive action to see massive results, but that strategy is difficult to apply and maintain. 

Consider weight loss. You can’t lose 25 lbs. in a day. Small changes occur to your weight each day. Those small, regular changes add up to impressive results.

Building a fortune, the perfect body, or a great relationship all take time and consistency.

Consistency requires habits or discipline, and discipline is in short supply. Use your discipline to develop useful habits. Relying on discipline day after day is a losing battle for most of us. While discipline can grow with effort, having effective habits is more effective and much less painful.

Learn to act in the moment. The greatest barrier to consistency is the belief that you can postpone an action to another day. Each day has the power to bring you closer to your goals. Each day lost is lost forever. 

The only real discipline required is the discipline to act right now.

Have reasonable expectations. When your time horizon is unrealistic, it’s not easy to be consistent. When you ask too much of yourself too soon, it’s just as challenging. Be positive and enthusiastic, but be reasonable. Put your focus on regular and consistent improvement. Perfection isn’t required.

Use reminders or triggers in your environment to encourage consistency. Think about the things that you do every day that could serve as reminders. Getting dressed, starting your car, and turning out the light each night are a few examples. 

Each night you turn out the light, you could visualize your goals. After getting dressed, you could do five pushups.

What you do once in a while doesn’t impact your life significantly. Rather, it’s what you do consistently. Consistency is a major predictor of success in any endeavor. Develop habits and routines that guarantee success. Consistent behaviors determine your outcomes, so choose behaviors that make sense.

If you’re ready to go after your goals and need professional support that will guide you, support you, and hold you accountable, while assisting you to gain the momentum you need to stay committed to your success, contact us for a free consultation! 

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Most clients that come to us who want to start, or grow, a business come with a pile of personal goals and wants of how they wish things in their business should be. When asked about their Customer Avatar, many of them stare at me with a blank expression or confused look on their face. This tells me almost immediately where the problem lies, and where our work will begin. You see, creating a comprehensive Customer Avatar is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your business. It not only speeds up revenue almost immediately, but it also saves a lot of wasted time on marketing strategies that are worthless if they’re not being targeted to your ideal client/customer effectively. 
If you don’t know what a Customer Avatar is, and why it is extremely important, you’re not alone. In fact, most business owners struggle with this piece of the marketing puzzle.
Here’s what a customer avatar is:

• A key component of your overall marketing strategy
• A fictional client with clear and specific wants, needs, values, principles, pain points, etc.
• A profile of a person who fits your target audience description
• A clear, detailed outline based on research

Many business owners and entrepreneurs like to jump right in and start building ads, writing copy, creating landing pages, and doing all that other fun marketing stuff…BUT if they don’t have their customer avatars completed, they are wasting their time, energy, and money. This is because if they don’t know who their customer is or what they want, then how can they effectively market to them? Therefore, a detailed customer avatar is one of the main factors to achieve business success, but how do you create one?
The first step is to list out their demographic and psychographic traits. Write down as much information as you can be based on what you know about your customer so far. If you don’t know much about your customer, then you need to interview them and ask them questions to come up with a comprehensive profile.
Next, give them a name that you will recognize and remember so when you are creating content for this avatar you will be able to pull up their profile easily.
Next, write a story as your customer avatar. Pretend you are them. What did they do before your service/product? What are they thinking while using your service/product? What are they trying to accomplish through your service/product? What do they do after using your service/product? When will they come back to your service/product? Etc.
The point is to force yourself to think through your marketing and advertising pathways and methods of retaining customers. This will help you to see how you may not have been communicating to your ideal client effectively and will assist you to create better strategies to help build trust with your customers and increase business revenue.
Once you develop strong customer avatars, you will be on your way to establishing repeat loyal customers and a solid and successful business. If you need help developing comprehensive customer avatars for your business, we can help!

​ Contact us for a free consultation! 


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Social media platforms have quickly grown to be a primary resource for businesses to market and grow their businesses online. When used effectively, social media can provide an economical and effective way to increase your revenue. Use these tips to connect with your ideal clients and customers through social media and increase your profits:
Have a solid social media strategy and market to your customers on their preferred platform.

• Consider how social media can be integrated into your current marketing strategy.
• Effective marketing requires a plan and commitment to see real results.
• Avoid just signing up for a Facebook and Twitter account and posting or tweeting without a plan in place.
• Ensure you know your target audience so you can market to your customers effectively.

• Track down where your customers congregate online and market to them directly.
• There are many communities within the various social media sites. Find out exactly which ones your customers prefer: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.

Consider the various ways you can build your business with social media.

• There are many ways to leverage the attention of your customers through social media.
• You could create marketing strategies to find new customers.
• You could also handle customer concerns publicly to show how responsive your company can be to customer service issues.
• Announcing sales or special events through social media is also a great idea for customer retention.

Be consistent and timely.

• Respond to any inquiries that result from your social media marketing and spend time online engaging with your audience each day.
• Avoid letting several days go by without being involved or seen online. Otherwise, people are likely to forget you.
• Remember that it takes an average of seven times of seeing something to remember it, so don’t worry about “over-doing it.” Keep posting!

Be as human as possible.

• With social media, it’s generally better to have a picture of your face, rather than just the company logo.
• People are far more likely to connect with a person than a faceless company. Try to be personal and authentic.
• Even if your company is more than just one person, do your best to share pictures of yourself and your team often so your audience feels like they know who you are, as this builds trust.

Track your results.

• Always track your results.
• If Twitter isn’t working, drop it, but you’ll never know whether a specific social medium is working unless you track your results.

Social media is relatively new, but you can easily take advantage of these new marketing opportunities and promote your business in many ways. Having a solid strategy is key, and implementing it often is the path to business success. If you need assistance with developing a winning strategy to market your business on social media platforms, contact us! Our team would be happy to help your business stand out and grow online! 

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