True entrepreneurs struggle with their business opportunities for a variety of reasons. Among the most obvious are a lack of capital, lack of understanding about marketing, and personnel issues. However, from my own entrepreneurial experience and knowledge of others, there are three major reasons individuals fail in entrepreneurial ventures.

They tie the success of their business with their own self worth.
They neglect to set realistic goals and plans for themselves and their business.
They are not prepared to pay the price of success.

True entrepreneurs with the right thinking prevail over a period of time.  They have learned to understand the axiom Roles, Goals, and Tolls.

Roles
Successful entrepreneurs, in contrast to those who struggle, have learned to separate their roles in life from their self worth or self-identity.  They understand that role performance or failure with their own venture is not a judgment of them as an individual.  People who tend to equate their self-worth to their composite role identity are inherently risk-adverse and look to maintain the status quo.  Being able to differentiate these two identities allows them to be risk prone vs. risk adverse, a key ingredient to success as an entrepreneur.  Individuals who have risked failure, experienced it, and learned from it, have not only learned how to differentiate their role identity from their self-identity, they have learned the lessons of risking and failing.  They understand that early failure in ventures is a natural part of successful startups. They are able to embrace those experiences, learn from them quickly and move on.  This is critical to success as an entrepreneur.  They must be willing to face and deal with early failures in order to prevail over time.

Goals
Even though much is said and written about goals and plans being necessary for success as an entrepreneur, few people learn the mechanics of successful goal setting and planning. It’s not the plan but the planning that is important, and the goal setting process allows them to develop the confidence to take risks and fail.    Successful entrepreneurs are not only goal driven and goal oriented; they have learned to execute the process of strategic and tactical goal setting and planning.  Visualizing goals, writing them down and putting together a detailed plan for achievement provides the confidence and motivation to prevail.  More than just business or operational plans, they have goals and plans for all the important roles in their life.  They have learned early that if they aren’t working their own plan they are probably part of someone else’s goals or plans.  They chart their own destiny, embrace risk-taking leadership positions, make adjustments as required and prevail over a course of time.

Tolls
Finally, entrepreneurs understand that there is a toll to pay.  To be successful in any role in life you must be prepared to pay full price one time.  There are really no overnight successes as an entrepreneur.  In fact, I‘ve heard it said that overnight success generally takes 15-20 years.  One of the early tolls that entrepreneurs are quite often forced to face is the “re-making” of themselves that can include growing beyond their current circle of contacts.  Since most people tend to stay within their own psychological comfort zone, they begin to lose identity with the risk taker.  They are comfortable with the type of person who is more like them. Quite often the entrepreneur moves on to a different circle of associates who understand the journey.  Stepping out, being your own person and venturing into the risk prone unknown is lonely by itself.  Consequently, there can be a newfound stress in old relationships.  It’s been said before that pioneers get shot in the front and the back, and only through a process of differentiating role performance from self-worth, being risk prone, prevailing through adversity, sticking to your goals, and adjusting your plans will you be prepared to pay the daily toll.

An entrepreneur has much to learn in order to be successful, including the day-to-day mechanics of running a business, producing products, delivering services, making money and dealing with people.  The biggest challenge of all is developing an understanding of themselves. They come to grips with what they want and what motivates them; this sustains their willingness to prevail over the long term against adversity.  Successful entrepreneurs have learned to transform their thinking, allowing them to prevail where others fail along the way.

Bill Scheessele is the President, Founder and CEO of Mastering Business Development, Inc., a 25-year Business Development consulting and training company. MBDi consults with firms in the energy, nuclear, engineering, pharmaceutical, IT, and other highly technical service industries helping them build proactive Business Development teams.

In these days of competitive markets, the business that excels at customer service is the one that will not only maintain their position, but grow.  You could answer the question “What is Customer service” by saying that it is about “exceeding” the expectations of the client, not just “satisfying” them.  This is not just about the product or service that you are selling; it’s about looking after the people buying them from you too.

Having a great product must be the first step.  Everybody likes quality, even more if it is competitively priced with other similar products.  If you make the product yourself, see what you can do to enhance how it performs, what it’s made from, how it compares with others.  If you can make the product the best there is within the price range, customers will not only buy from you, but they will recommend others to buy from you too.

So, you have a great product and your client base is growing – how is your pre and after sales service doing?  Not many people think about how they sell the product, but it is still literally serving the customer. How many of us have put the phone down on someone who has been given the unenviable task of cold calling clients to try and sell goods?

Cold calling and pressure sales are two areas that have managed to give selling a bad name, particularly if they are persistent, repetitive and quite obviously so desperate to make a sale that they become aggressive. This is most definitely not what is customer service.  Most of us would prefer to do our own market research when looking to buy something and the Internet has made it all so much easier.   If you want to build your client base, having a website is now essential rather than an optional extra.  Customers can look at the product, find out more about it and then contact you if they are interested.  If they register with your site, you are able to build a list of potential customers too, to contact them again at a later date.

It might seem, from what is written above, that there is no place for person to person selling any more.  Quite the opposite is the case, from the research I have done, it would appear that most customers would welcome speaking to someone who is knowledgeable about the product (that’s the important bit!) and is able to resolve any problems quickly.  Call centres in India might be cheaper to run than local ones, but do the operators understand what the product is, do they even want to?

With the best will in the world, things can go wrong.  For example, there could be a faulty batch manufactured, or if you are offering a service someone fails to turn up to an appointment.  Complaints start coming in and you can either stick your head in the sand and ignore it or you can admit the mistake and try and rectify the situation to everyone’s satisfaction.  Good customer service will always take the second route.  Why?  Because by dealing with a problem quickly and efficiently, that customer goes away happy and will tell his friends what a good organization you are.  Ignoring problems or just not resolving them quickly and satisfactorily really annoys customers and they won’t recommend you to others.  According to one survey, 68% of customers will leave a supplier if they encounter an attitude of indifference.

A personal example now.  My car broke down not too far from a local garage.  I rang them up and, without hesitation, they stated that they would go and collect my car and repair it.  They called me later in the day to tell me how much it would cost and did I want them to repair it (Gold star no. 1).  They said they would waive the cost of collecting the car as it was not too far from the garage (Gold star no. 2).  They repaired the car and made sure that everything else was okay too – at no extra expense (Gold star no. 3).  A week after the repair, they phoned me to ask whether everything was still okay and was there anything else they could do for me (Gold star no. 4, 5, 6 and 7!).  I was extremely satisfied with the service and have bought cars from them since and recommended the garage to friends too.  To me this is the answer to “what is customer service?”. There is no better advertisement for a supplier of either goods or services than great customer service.