7 Standard Action Steps to Business Success

7 Standard Action Steps to Business Success

Although it is not so far, business success sometimes can be miles away from entrepreneurs. Why is this the reality in many cases, and what can you do? Here I will talk about seven action steps that you can take now.

In the last three to four years, through the analysis of many business elements of my clients, I found that everything is happening around the same elements as seven action steps that produce different habits of entrepreneurs. These seven action steps also produce different results for different businesses.

Because everything is connected somehow with these seven action steps, they become essential in our efforts for improvements.

These elements are shown in the form of 7 action steps below.

#1: Research

You, as an entrepreneur, will always need to research something. You will collect different types of information about everything inside or outside your business. These researches are important for your next action steps and decision-making process.

The research can be about your internal processes, market, competition, products and services, customers, etc. Each of these researches will give you valuable information about the decision-making process in your business.

You will always need to know more about your business. For example, you will need to know about the market you are targeting. You will have to know what products you are going to sell. You will need to know about the competition and the weaknesses and strengths of your competitors. Knowing what you are doing and why you are doing it is the key to success.

If you want to be successful, you need to collect information. You need to find out if someone has been doing what you want to do or not. You need to know how they do it. You can learn about their products and services. This way, you can compare your business ideas to those already successful. You can learn a lot about the market and how to get into it.

You can also find out if the product or service you are going to offer is something people want. You can find out if the product or service is useful. Also, you need to know what you are offering to your target customers.

Action Step #2: Analyze

The data you collect from the previous step will not be valuable for you and your business if they are not analyzed, studied, and transformed in the form of insights for future reference. That means they will need to be stored appropriately and evaluated in terms of relevance and significance for your business.

Business success in 7 action steps
Business success in 7 steps

The most important thing to remember is that when you gather data, you must analyze it. To do this, you need to think of the information you have collected. Analyze it with respect to different aspects. You can divide the collected data into sub-groups and use these groups to find patterns. After you have done this, you will be able to find insights into the data. This helps you make decisions that will help you reach your goals and achieve your dreams.

RelatedReal-life Organizational Decision-Making Examples

#3: Conclude

Any research should automatically lead to some conclusion. What needs to be extracted as a conclusion from the analyzed data? Everything else will be based on those conclusions. The decision, strategy, or plan you will make will be mainly based on those conclusions.

When you are doing your research, be critical of what you read. Don’t believe everything that you read. Always remember to compare the information with the facts and verify it before believing it. This will help you to avoid getting misled by unreliable information. Make sure to check your sources and the evidence they present. If you find a source that is not reliable, don’t use that source and try to find a new one that is better. Your conclusion should be based on the evidence and facts presented by your source. Remember that you should be able to find out the truth by using your critical thinking skills.

Action Step #4: Plan

You must transform the conclusions into the form of a strategy and plan that will support the implementation of your strategy.

When you have decided on the conclusion you want to use, you should plan how to get there. If you have done some research, you can write down everything you learned. Then, think about how to apply it. Make sure that you understand it and that you can make it happen. Make sure that you do this and that you do this well.

If you don’t plan, you will have no idea how to reach your goal. You need to write down your goals and write them in detail. When you have everything written down, you need to decide on the best method to achieve your goals. Writing is a wonderful tool to remind yourself of the goal. Once you have decided which method you will use to accomplish your goal, you need to write down the steps to reach your goal. Remember to be organized and to avoid procrastination. A planner can help you to stay focused on your goals. That way, you can focus on what you have to do.

#5: Implement

The plan is here to be implemented rather than standing on the shelves. Once you finish your plan, don’t procrastinate, start with the implementation.

After you finish writing your plan, don’t procrastinate. The longer you wait to start with the implementation, the less likely you will succeed. 

If you have been planning something for a long time, and if you don’t start doing it right away, it will be useless. This is because you will never execute your plan correctly. You will only waste your time if you wait for an opportunity to come and then miss it. Therefore, don’t wait. Take action! If you are going to do something, do it right away because it’s too late to change when you start it. Start taking action.

Action Step #6: Measure

It is not good to start something and not know whether it is right or wrong after the implementation. Because of that, you will need to measure your implementation process, which will tell you whether everything you do is as you planned to be.

After the implementation, you need to make sure that you did everything correctly, and if anything goes wrong, you should try to fix it. 

You will need to measure the performance of your implementation process. One way to do that is by measuring the results of your implementation. For example, you can use graphs and charts to check the progress of your program. 

#7: Improve

Measurement and the research will draw conclusions about what is right and what is wrong. Everything wrong always can and must be improved to become right in the next or future cycles. Everything that is right, you need to keep it right or improve it to be even better.

And of course, the process with these 7 action steps doesn’t end here, it continues from the beginning – the first step.

This is the cycle, not the process that has a starting and ending point. That’s the essence of successful businesses and the entrepreneurs who manage those businesses.

Question: Do you have the process cycle that you implement in your everyday entrepreneurial job?