How To Succeed in Business – By Preparing!
A career in business can be extremely rewarding, and for those with the right drive and personality, working for yourself, selling your products and services, and building your business as you go can be the ideal job choice. Yet there must be certain elements in place before you can get started down this path. If you don’t prepare properly to begin with, you’ll have a much harder time trying to be successful and get noticed. This is true whether you want to work for yourself or for someone else.
Read on to find out exactly what you need to succeed in business and how to get started on an exciting new career path.
What Do You Know?
Before you can start applying for jobs in business or start your own business, you need to assess your skills and see what you already know. What do you have the most confidence in about yourself? You might have an excellent head for figures, or perhaps marketing is your strong suit. It’s crucial to be honest with yourself and to ensure that you absolutely do know what you think you know. It would be a bad idea to assume something and then go to an interview and not be able to provide evidence or information.
When you know which skills you are best at – perhaps even which skills you enjoy the most – you can better determine which area of business you want to go into. This is yet another reason why it is so important to be absolutely honest about what you know and what you are missing out on.
What Don’t You Know?
When you are assessing your skills, you will come across gaps in your knowledge. You have two options at this point. The first is to ignore the gaps and concentrate on what you know best, and the second is to do additional studies to plug the gaps completely. This latter choice doesn’t have to be a problem if you choose to look at online courses such as the Lean Six Sigma Black Belt course. (As a Black Belt, you will be engaged in large scale transformation projects, company-wide change management programs.) These business courses are ones you could take in your own time, working at your own pace, which won’t interfere with your everyday life, but which will help you to know more about business.
By ensuring that you have a more rounded knowledge of business, you will be more successful when it comes to impressing at an interview, or, if you are starting your own business, you will be more confident in your knowledge. At the beginning of any new business, you are likely to have to do the different tasks until you can hire people to do them for you, so it’s good to have an overview of what is required.
Know The Competition
Whether you want to start your own business or work for someone else, you will need to know who your competition is. This will give you a great deal of information that you can use to your advantage. You’ll be able to see:
- The marketing strategies that are working (and those that are not)
- Pricing information
- How similar businesses run
- What social media strategies they have in place
All of this and more is going to be useful to you. You can outsource this investigation work to a third party if you prefer, but it may be just as easy – and perhaps quicker – to do it yourself.
When you know more about the competition, you will find it easier to do your own job. You can position yourself differently because it is the differences between you and the competition that is really going to be critical here. Show those differences, and customers will come to you more readily. If they think you’re the same as everyone else, they won’t be so interested in what you are doing.
Who Do You Want To Work For?
Sometimes it’s a good idea to work for someone else before launching your own business (assuming that is your end goal, of course). You will be able to learn a lot more, and your resume will look much more impressive. In order to gain the knowledge you are looking for and the skills you need, you’ll need to look around and determine who you want to work for; which company is going to give you the best start?
Research is essential at this point. Once you know which industry you want to work in (and this should be something you are interested in, to begin with), you can make a list of the businesses that also work in that industry. Research each one, and you should be able to decide which ones you think would be best to work for. Work out the pros and cons of each one until you have narrowed the list down.
Contact the best choice first. If they are not advertising any jobs, send a speculative email and attach your resume. It might be that they do have a position for you. Work your way down the list until you are able to gain a meeting, interview, or be invited to apply for a job.
Network
Sometimes it is, as the saying goes, not what you know but who you know. Although, in reality, it is more likely to be a little of both of these things, and having knowledge is going to stand you in good stead once you start the job, the fact that networking will play a part is something to consider.
We’re not suggesting that you use your friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances to find yourself somewhere to work as such, but remember to mention to people that you are looking. They might be able to suggest somewhere or someone to help you out.
Networking requires a delicate balance between asking people for help and learning about your industry – get it right, and the perfect position should come to you. Networking doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but there are ways that you can do it that will suit you. Some like to attend regular weekly or monthly networking meetings during which you can speak to people who are looking for others to link up with. You can also work online, using sites such as LinkedIn to find new contacts.
Develop A Business Idea
If you want your business career to take you along a path that will ultimately lead to you launching your own firm, you should start thinking about creating your business concept as soon as possible. Consider the following ideas to help you:
- Finding a mentor to help you through the process
- Performing regular market research
- Concentrating on your own abilities and interests
- Developing a business strategy
You will be able to tweak your company concept over time and guarantee that it is ready for when you are ready to go on the adventure of starting your own business.
Work For Someone Else
Only through working for a well-known company will you be able to properly comprehend the business world and how it operates. This will enable you to polish your abilities in a practical setting, shadow senior business executives with in-depth knowledge of the industry, and experience how actual businesses work on a daily basis.
You can then use the knowledge you gain here for your own company or any other company you operate in the future. Furthermore, working for a well-known brand might be helpful when applying for a business post, as many companies prefer people with in-depth knowledge and real-world experience in the industry.