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11 Personal Factors That Determine Business Success

StrategyDriven Professional Development Article |Determine Business Success|11 Personal Factors That Determine Business SuccessThere’s no shortage of things that influence how successful a business will be. Much of it has to do with the strength of the idea and the execution of those ideas. However, it’s also important to remember that they’re not the only things that influence business success. It’s a complicated aspect of life that everything from politics to world events can influence. One of the biggest influences is personal. It’s about the person who’s leading the company.

In this blog, we’re going to run through a bunch of personal factors that you should keep an eye on because they might just impact the future of your business.

Your Routine

It’s not just what you do while you’re at the office that counts, but what you do outside of the office too. You’ll likely be pretty good at coming up with routines for when you’re at work. But it’s also important that you have a routine outside of work, too. If your routine isn’t well established, or it’s damaging, then you’ll be unlikely to arrive at work ready to hit the ground running. A chaotic schedule outside the office will create chaos inside the office!

Where You Work

It’s not just how you work that’ll guide the future of your company, but also where you work. There’s a big difference between working at a cramped kitchen table and working in a beautiful office. This is something that we all intuitively know, but it’s actually been backed up by research in recent years. People work better when they like their surroundings! If you’re currently uninspired by your working environment, then it could be time to upgrade your office space. You’ll find that, by doing this, you don’t just work better, but that you also raise your company’s standards.

Soft Skills

You may have a vision for where you want to take your business. But you won’t be the only person involved in that process — there’ll be plenty of others, from staff to contractors to customers and beyond. As such, it’s vitally important that any leader develops the soft skills they need to get where they want to go. Everything becomes much easier when you’re effortlessly able to talk with other people in a friendly manner, for example. Don’t worry if this isn’t something that comes naturally to you — as with most things, it’s something that you can learn.

Energy Levels

It takes a lot of time, effort, and energy to build a successful company. If you lack any of those things, then you’ll find things difficult. So let’s think about energy. Are you continually getting tired and finding it difficult to work at a high level throughout the day? Then it’s likely that something needs to change. There are plenty of tried and tested methods for boosting energy levels. For example, you can improve your sleep, begin exercising (which boosts endurance), and rethink your relationship with coffee; that caffeine hit will be beneficial at first but may cause an energy crash later in the day.

Optimism

There are times when we make our own reality. If you go into things with an optimistic, positive attitude, then you’ll be much more likely to succeed than if you went into it with a negative attitude. Your attitude might seem like a small influencer, but it’s not — especially not when you expand the timeframe over the course of a lifetime. A person with a positive attitude will see and do things that the negative person would not. Of course, you can’t be positive all the time, but if you find yourself slipping into negativity a little, then it’ll be important to rein things back in a little.

Leadership Skills

Business owners learn, at some point or another, that they won’t just be in charge of their own work. They’ll also be in charge of other people’s work. And that means that they’ll need to call upon their leadership skills if everything’s going to run smoothly! There’s a big difference between being a boss and being a leader. Anyone can be a boss. It takes work to become a leader. But it’s work that’s worthwhile conducting because of the massive impact it can have on a business — and, indeed, the impact it can have on the lives of the workforce.

Adaptability

There are some things in life that you can control and some things that you can’t. When you’re running a business, you can do a lot to ensure that your company can work well. But then, you never know what’s going to happen. Any number of external factors could play a role. And when they do, it’ll be the company’s adaptability that determines how well they’re able to continue moving forward. It’s a good idea not to get too locked into one way of doing things. If you’re open and adaptable, then you’ll be able to roll with the punches and find success in a new environment.

Ability to Spot Problems

There’s value in valuing the good things that you do. But in many cases, it’s identifying the things you’re not doing correctly that can have the biggest impact on a company. The good aspects of the organization will naturally reveal themselves. The bad ones can stay lurking in the corner until at some point they reveal themselves — and at that point, it may be much more difficult to undo the damage. It’s a good idea to perform periodic reviews of your company’s operations to check that there’s not some fundamental error that could cause major problems.

Outside of Work

It’s impossible to have a frantic personal life and run a successful business, at least on a long-term basis. They say that you should keep your public and personal lives separate, but that’s never as easy as they make out. There’s a lot of value in working to ensure that you’re physically, mentally, and spiritually well – as well as making life more enjoyable, it’ll allow you to work better. Of course, most people don’t need to radically change their overall health. But even small improvements can make a big difference. For instance, if you’re drinking alcohol a little too regularly, then a short break can do wonders.

Willingness to Learn

You’ll begin your company knowing some things about what it takes to be successful. But the majority of what you know should be learned when you’re running the business. If you make time for — and have a willingness for — learning, then you’ll be putting yourself in a good position for success. There are plenty of highly valuable business blogs, books, podcasts and more out there that can give you the inside scoop on what it takes to find success. However, while all that information is there, it’s up to you to seek out and absorb that information!

The Grind

Finally, let’s talk about the grind. You could know everything about building a successful company, but if you don’t have the capacity to work for long hours and chip away at all the tasks you need to do, then you won’t be successful. The grind is something that you can’t think about or read about in books — you just have to do it. There’ll be times when your business has to be your whole life. Make it so!

Conclusion

And there we have it. The above won’t guarantee success, of course, because there are so many other elements involved. But they will be important steps along your journey towards building a successful company that make everything easier.

StrategyDriven Leadership Conversation Episode 1 – An Introduction to Leadership Effectiveness

StrategyDriven Leadership Conversations focus on the values and behaviors characteristic of highly effective leaders. Complimenting the StrategyDriven Management & Leadership articles, these conversations examine the real world challenges managers face every day that are not easily solved with a new or redesigned process and instead demand the application of soft leadership skills to achieve a positive outcome.

Episode 1 – An Introduction to Leadership Effectiveness introduces the concept of leadership effectiveness by exploring what leadership effectiveness is, the characteristics and behaviors exhibited by effective leaders, and the impacts of organizational culture and situational conditions on leadership effectiveness.

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