Entrepreneurs Embrace Change
By Dan Boudreau
Entrepreneurs must be willing and able to adapt to continuous change.
As an owner, change will saturate all aspects of your business. Some people love it; others would rather not deal with it. For those who prefer stability, change can burn up energy and cause stress. It’s healthy to assess your ability to deal with change before taking on business ownership.
Here are a few of the ways change can impact your business.
- The longer you take to develop a business plan, the more changes you will have to grapple with and, as you shift from planning to operating a business, things really tend to change. Even the best business plans are only platforms from which to adapt to changes.
- In business, you will work hard to develop positive relationships with corporate customers, only to discover your key contacts get new jobs, transfer, quit, or get fired. When a cherished client moves on, you have to start at ground zero to build a new relationship his replacement.
- As a seller, you work hard to build credibility with suppliers, only to have them drop off your radar—mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, phasing out old products, new management, new policies, repositioning—any of these events will trigger changes.
- In order to be competitive, businesses invest in the training of employees or subcontractors. This investment can easily turn into slippage as trained workers cheerfully move on to work with your competitors, or compete with you by starting their own businesses.
- You might build a segment or even all of your business on a platform of government policy or political direction, only to have it change as new politicians or as completely new regimes take the helm.
- As an inventor, you might burn the midnight oil to build a new gadget, only to have a competitor trump you by innovating, lobbying, undercutting, or adapting your product to create a better one.
- You will invest time to learn new technology, only to have an updated version or a newer, more powerful option appear on the market, necessitating that you jettison the old and grapple with the new.
- You might operate for years without having to worry about non-local competitors, only to discover your key clients are now able to purchase products and services at lower rates via the Internet.
Whatever business you are in, you will continually adapt to new trends and fads. Rising and falling economies—local, national and global—will constantly influence your business direction and goals.
Each change offers an opportunity to innovate and manage your businesses direction. For the most part changes lead to business improvements. For entrepreneurs, one of the great thrills of owning a business is the thrill of embracing change through continuous innovation.
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“Dan Boudreau is President and CEO of Macrolink Action Plans Inc. and the RiskBuster Business Plan Oasis at http://www.riskbuster.com Writing your own business plan can be easy, fast and fun! Instantly download a free copy of Dan’s popular fast-track business plan template, The Shell, when you subscribe to the RiskBuster Business Plan Insider at http://www.riskbuster.com.”
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