Learn from the Best: 5 Habits that Grow Your Business (Part 2)

Successful individuals and companies share certain characteristics. Learn these habits, and you will grow your business!

In the first installment of this blogpost I told you about the habits of successful individuals. They are: do not be afraid to fail, dare to go off the beaten path, choose an excellent team, network extensively and know how to listen. This time, I want to help you translate these 5 principles into 5 concrete tasks. Here they are:

In large part, this is a matter of character, but obviously, things such as health and balance of work and leisure time also play a role.

For example, a good night’s rest is one of the key elements of good health. Furthermore, a good sleeping pattern will make you psychologically more robust, and believe me, your colleagues will note the difference too.

The great thing is health can be supported by apps. By monitoring, for example, the hours you sleep and then act to adjust that if necessary, you may prevent many other problems. Click here to explore some great apps to monitor your sleep.

Innovation plays a critical role in determining whether your organization will thrive or fail. Accomplish this by instilling a culture of innovation.

In my opinion, that is an environment in which knowledge is shared, and managers receive workplace feedback. Furthermore, innovative organizations are not hierarchical but have a flat structure.

Your employees are the face of the organization. If you want to embrace growth and innovation, you should search for people with the right competencies.

RevelX partner Noud van Alem has some great insights about building the right team. In summary, you should search for people with digital and growth hacking competency, and continue to train them.

Today, the business world is less about competition and more about partnerships. Forbes calls it “frenemies in business.” An exciting trend is the collaboration of big corporations and startups.

In many instances, this collaboration is accomplished through a corporate accelerator. That is a startup accelerator which is sponsored by an established corporation. They support early-stage startup companies through mentorship and often capital and office space.

Both partners win. The big companies stay close to emerging trends or establish a funnel for corporate venture capital investments, and the startups receive funding and a chance to pitch their product.

You should know the workings of both your own company and your customers like they have been X-rayed. Analytics solutions and monitoring tools offer a way to accomplish this. In a blogpost, my colleague Noud van Alem described some inspiring examples of Big Data’s value.

As Noud emphasizes, 20% of a business’ customers are responsible for 80% of the profit earned, and it is your job to locate these customers with the right analytics tools! Big Data solutions can be used to cut costs and to optimize your prices too.

I hope I have inspired you like I am inspired every day by the great entrepreneurs I meet. I have learned a lot from them, and I hope you will appreciate their lessons for succeeding in business.