What does it take to be successful in business?

I’m guessing you can begin listing a dozen things right off the top of your head. I know I can – clear vision, business plan, marketing plan, metrics, proper positioning in a highly refined niche market, branding, marketing message, growth strategies, solid business structure, etc. The list just goes on and on.

But one thing is missing from my list – and maybe yours. Rocky Balboa knows what it is. It’s what made him successful as a boxer – and yes, I know he’s a fictional character. That one thing…perseverance – steadfastness in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.

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I have a friend who’s been self-employed in one way or another for more than ten years. She’s brilliant, caring and a really good communicator. Anyone who works with her immediately sees her huge range of gifts.

But this friend of mine – whose name I’m not going to mention – hasn’t made much of her business. Well, I should say businesses.

You see over the past twelve years or so she’s had, maybe, eight businesses. All have focused on providing some array of services based on her varied background. Each one has taken a somewhat unique approach to helping people overcome various problems in their lives. And each one could have probably been quite successful.

But here she sits, more than a decade later, struggling to make ends meat. She keeps wondering how she’s not successful when she has all these great ideas of how to help people and make money doing it. Yet she never sticks long enough in one business concept to see it become successful for her.

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If you’re an educator, coach, consultant or advisor you usually want one main thing for your clients – that they use your advice.

That only makes sense, right? They’re paying you fees, sometimes large fees, to help them either change something or accomplish something that they just can’t manage on their own. It doesn’t matter whether you’re hired to give advice, as a consultant might do, or be more hands-on in helping with change as a coach might – the desired outcome is still the same.

This sometimes leads to pressure to help our clients get results. A little pressure on the client to change is good. After all, change is seldom easy and often requires a little push to get started (okay, and sometimes a big push).

Yet any good coach or consultant knows that we have to manage our clients and how they progress with a bit of skill. Sometimes we can put it all out there and people get it. Other times we have to pull back a bit and offer change in small steps. So we give each client what they can handle in the way they can implement it best. As I’ve seen it, this is the art to being an effective coach or consultant – and even to being an effective teacher, parent, spouse, or friend really.

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There are lots of keys to creating a successful business. Yet the one that I’ve found to be most important – and often most lacking in small businesses is positioning.

There’s lots of definitions of positioning because the term is often used along side branding. The definition that I gravitate to is:

Positioning is the space that you wish to occupy in your target audience’s mind, relative to your competitors.

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Okay, I’m a bit of a quote hound. I love reading the concise wisdom of how others saw life. And few provide more interested quotes than Benjamin Franklin.

If you remember, a few weeks back I wrote a post titled, What Benjamin Franklin Knew About Social Media. In it, I took a number of his quotes about people, life and relating with others, showing how he was a social media expert more than 200 years ago.

In his life, Ben Franklin also ran a number of businesses. So I’ve been interested in how he saw business. What were the principles he worked by. And, more interestingly, what wisdom could we learn from his perspectives. So let’s take a look:

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Many of the days I work with clients seem to have themes around them. Yesterday was no exception.

The clients I advised yesterday were dealing with the same issues. While each of their businesses had some success, none had the foundation stabilize and sustain their growth.

Having a solid foundation is as important to your business as it is to your home. Can you build a house without a foundation? Sure you can. You can erect the walls, place the roof and move in – and even live comfortably for a short time. But at some point, the bad weather you face could knock your house down. And at the very least sun, wind, rain and snow will erode the earth under your walls, making them ever weaker.

Your business is the same way in that it’s only as strong as the foundation you build it on. Building a strong foundation to run your business on will give you the stability to grow long-term while sustaining shifts in the weather. A weak foundation, on the other hand, leaves you vulnerable in ways that can disrupt and even collapse your business.

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