Successful business owners may face a bit of a paradox:

“How can I build and grow my business, preserving my company’s unique qualities while following the commonly followed best practices?”

The key is in planning! And here are four things you should consider to position your unique business to success:

1. Embrace the goals-setting

Yes, every business is unique, but one common element that successful businesses have is setting goals. Without goals, businesses are pretty much reactive. Which makes it practically impossible for them to predict if they will succeed or not.

On the other hand, an indicator of good planning is a certain degree of flexibility in changing and adjusting the goals. Many things are out of our control, so a goal you’ve set five years ago, maybe not be relevant today. Successful business owners develop the ability to pivot when it is necessary.

In short, goal-setting is one major thing that sets apart successful business owners from the rest, and the kinds of goals and their combination is what make them unique.

As you grow your business, you find your combination of goals and achieving them become chapters in your business’s unique success story.

2. Utilize every available resource

Another example of uniqueness between the businesses is the resources, available to the owners outside of their businesses, and the way they manage it. Some will reinvest every penny back into the business, others will drain every dollar they can to use it elsewhere.

Regardless of the approach, you must leverage what you have available, to achieve what you need. And you guessed it right: proper planning is your best friend in an accurate evaluation of the available resources and determining the best way to transform them into what you need to achieve your goals.

3. Step out more

Your business is feeding you and your family. But what would happen if you have to involuntarily step out? Will it feed your family without you? Have you created a successful business?

Many business owners dream about the ability to leave their business on their terms: when they want and for the money, they want to support their desired lifestyle.

This can happen only if the business can run without you. And if it doesn’t.., is it really successful? And, by the way: this holds true whether you leave the business during your lifetime, or at death.

If you plan to leave before the death, and your business relly on you running it, you may end up working for your successor for an unforeseen period of time as part of the deal.

Making your business less “owner-centric” can help you avoid this and leave it on your terms. Also, in a short term, it can significantly reduce the stress of running the business.

On the other hand, if your plan is to work until your last day, you still have people who rely on your business: your family and partners, your employees, and your loyal customers. Planning for the business to continue running if you were to die or become incapacitated unexpectedly is critical to take care of them in your absence.

In both cases, unless your business is ready to run independently, you’ll have a hard time achieving the financial securities of people you care about.

4. Plan for your successor’s success

Simply put: if you plan for your successor’s success, you start to look at your business from a different perspective. It doesn’t make any difference if you plan to hand your business to a family member, key employee, or sell it to a third party – you need to get it ready for them. And the best time to take the steps to achieve that goal is while you own the business and well before your ideal retirement date.

Business owners who build their business planning for success for their desired successor, make decisions today with that future in mind. They spend more time developing support systems, streamlining and documenting the processes, working on customer relationships, and building strong teams, that are capable to deliver the results to the successor.

Planning the exit in advance will give you more control over the company’s future and the transaction when you are ready to step out. 

To sum it up

Every owner and every business is unique, but one thing the successful ones will have in common is adherence to the planning.

Yes. The definition of success is different from business to business, but it is hard to argue with the fact that your chances of achieving your goals are much higher if you carefully plan for them rather than just hoping for good luck.

At Congruent Clarity, we are passionate about helping business owners identify and prioritize their goals, and develop detailed plans to achieve them. So if you are ready to take your business to the next step, let’s set some time to talk about your goals and possible ways you can achieve them.