The Art of Taking Risks

If you'd wanted a safe life, you would have stayed in your day job. Entrepreneurial ventures offer the potential for unlimited success and self-fulfilment, but they can also bring serious risks. To maximize your chances for success, remember these three tips for risk management: 1. Think Like Your Client Business owners are typically driven, dedicated, and passionate about what they do. While such enthusiasm is an entrepreneurial survival skill, it can also make it difficult to see how things look from an outsider's perspective.  Put yourself in your client's shoes. If you were seeing your business right now with fresh eyes, how would it look? Is your website easy to navigate? Is your ad copy clear and engaging? Is it obvious that your products or services solve a problem in a unique and valuable way? Seeing things from your buyer's perspective simplifies decisions and minimizes risks.  2. Focus on Selling When starting a business, it can be tempting to do as much as possible in the beginning to position yourself for success later. You want the best tools, even if they require a significant initial investment. You want to drive brand awareness, even if the people who become aware of you aren't ready to buy. You want to attend every networking event, even if you're already swamped with contacts who don't really help you. Infrastructure, brand awareness, and networking are all vital for long-term entrepreneurial success, but the hard truth is that none of that matters unless you can sell something. If an investment of time, money, or energy doesn't add to your bottom line, scrap it. Successful entrepreneurs stay focused on what matters: driving sales and satisfying customers. 3. Don't Stop Believing You took a major risk when you started your business. You put your finances, time, reputation, and sanity on the line for something that wasn't guaranteed. Why did you do it? You took a chance because you believed you had something-- a product, a skill, a perspective-- that was worth it. Take a moment and write down the reasons you chose to have faith in yourself and your business. Make a bullet point list of everything that makes your company truly amazing, unique, and worth believing in. Whenever things get rough, take out that list and reread it. Yes, you took a risk. Yes, you may face temporary setbacks. But at the end of the day, you've created a business that adds value to your life and to the world. It would have been a crazy risk not to take.