Steps to becoming a successful micro-preneur

Whether you have always planned to start your own venture or have decided to challenge your potential and skills by leaving your high-paying job to start one and manage it all on your own, you must be open to learning new skills to reach the pinnacle of success. Remember the old adage, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and not all successful businesses started as big enterprises. In fact, there are many who start small and face innumerable challenges before finally reaching the stage of stability.
You may have all the passion to be a micro-preneur, setting up your own home-based small business but a lack of skills and strategy can actually prevent you from running a successful business. While some are born with entrepreneurial talent for starting and running businesses, others need to learn the same from scratch. And, apart from skills, there are numerous other approaches and tactics that must be followed for your small business endeavours. Here are a few of them:

1. Invest in your venture and yourself

If you’ve just started with your initial project and are struggling to get work done due to a lack of the right knowledge, equipment or software, make some investments in all of these as they will be worthwhile in the long run. You must also invest in additional training and education to expand your own skill set. Instead of considering this as an expenditure, look at such investments as crucial assets.

2. Delegate work as much as possible

Just because you are known as a small business entrepreneur, you are not expected to take charge of every task to run the business. There must be tasks that you hate doing, or that take your crucial time away from key areas of your business. You must change your mindset of doing everything on your own and save up on hiring external help. Start by recognising the tasks that can be managed without your help. They could be marketing, accounting, or even administrative tasks. Find someone who can do it for you, which does not mean you need to hire a person on a full-time basis. You can hire marketing consultants and freelancers for such tasks and pay for them accordingly. It will be worth the investment, leaving you with extra time to focus on a lot more.

3. Don the hat of a salesperson

If you are the face of your business and know every detail of it, you can be the best salesperson of your own work. You may dislike the many connotations that this word comes with but you must remember that the success of your business will entirely depend on your level of confidence when you sell it. Don’t know how to do it? Attend some sales-specific seminars or webinars to get started.

4. Get out of your comfort zone

There is a common notion that being a micro-preneur is like being your own boss. This means you get to enjoy the luxury of working from home. You are probably minimising your chances of gaining success here. There is a reason why many freelancers work from coffee shops and co-working spaces. This gives them an opportunity to mingle with people from different fields of business and backgrounds that can help in giving you an idea about what’s going on in the industry, how are your competitors doing etc. By networking and spending hours outside your home, you also get to know about upcoming trends and technologies and much more. Being surrounded by the external world can actually help you in strategising well for your business to remain competitive so get out of that mind-space that you must always be working from the comfort of your home office.

5. Don’t refrain from taking breaks

We agree that you are the key person overseeing every department of your business and can’t take the risk of ignoring anything by going on vacations or movies or any other leisure activities. Mind it, taking a break every now and then is yet another way to achieve success, and how? When you are going for a small weekend getaway to the hills or taking the Saturday off to simply spend some time with family, read and play some sport, you are actually rejuvenating your mind and body to think afresh and work with a renewed perspective when you’re back. Ignoring the idea of taking breaks will eventually harm your ability to perform well in your business.

6. Work harder to keep existing customers coming back

Getting old customers to keep coming back to you is a far better feeling than having a new one on board. It shows that you are serving them right. So make a resolution to work hard in retaining your customers. After all, a loyal customer base that continues to take your services is crucial to getting a stable business and also important referrals. Let your existing customer base be the best ambassadors for your business.

(Ms Divya Jain is CEO & Founder, Safeducate. Views expressed here are personal)