Our mission her at Purple Yak is to support as many small business owners as we can each year, our ambition is create 500 millionaires before 2030. This will create £500 million for our Purple Yak members. That includes you, yes you, so we’ve created a series of business advice posts to help you on your journey.
Be mentally ready
You need to initially assess your ability and willingness to deal with all the individual aspects of the business. Some business tasks are more challenging than others, and not everything will work out well the first time.
If you want to start a business, it is imperative to be mentally prepared for the highs and lows that may come. If you only focuses on the easy and enjoaxsyable aspects of the business, you will usually underestimate the situation and encounter many more difficulties on your journey. You are much more likely to achieve success if you have a realistic idea and treat the easy and challenging tasks with equal enthusiasm and effort.
Build your business idea
Initially, to start a business, you need to have a unique functional idea or concept for the product or service that you plan to offer.
Observe the market and competitors, assess in what sectors you may be of help to bridge a gap and fulfil a customer need. Identify the potential customers needs and aim to create and offer viable solutions.
To be in the best position for business success, put yourself in the shoes of the customer you’re likely to serve and list down all their needs and requirements. It is probable that you might be able to identify a section of the market which remained unexplored and you might bank on the opportunity to fill the gap. Explore deep
As JLD from Entrepreneur’s on Fire says “the riches are in the niches”.
Test your business idea
In business the ultimate currencies are time and money, with time being the most valuable because you can’t get it back once it’s gone but you can always make more money. That’s why it is imperative at the beginning of your business or when launching a new service or product that you test the idea first before ploughing in your hard earned money and extremely precious time.
It can be really easy to get lost in the romance of something new and exciting but you need consider if it rights for your potential customer and that they’re willing to pay for it.
Once you’ve got a concept of the perfect solution, come up with the perfect idea now it’s time to test it with your friends, family, neighbours, colleagues and most importantly real potential clients. Gather as much feedback as possible then tweak your solution, pricing and process to best fit what your potential clients want and need.
Carry out market research
There’s the good, the bad and the ugly of doing market research. Having your family and friends entirely on board with your idea is far from a reliable proof of concept. Most people think correctly validating your concept takes too much time, effort and resources before getting relevant insights. Most successful entrepreneur’s disagree. Let’s assume you have already covered the basics such as identifying your target audience, analysed their pain points and come up with a unique value proposition. It is then time to get some much-needed feedback so you can tweak, pivot or scrap your offering.
Find out opinions on similar products
Online groups and blog conversations can give you a good insight into what consumers honestly think about a product or service, to identify their needs and expectations, and find out what upsets them. For example, large online retailers such as Amazon or eBay use a 1-5 star grading system which enables you to learn the average feeling about a product including views from all sides of the customer base: satisfied, neutral and dissatisfied customers.
Organise a focus group
The idea of a focus group is to assemble a small group of people and ask them about their opinions, perceptions, or beliefs about your concept. It is a good way of gaining some insight on what people think of your product, service, concept, advertisement, idea or packaging. This doesn’t need to be a formal face to face group it could be on a social media platform, Facebook is our favoured platform due to its reach, audience and group functionalities. Doing this will help you start on your community building as well.
Know your market
Once you have an idea about what you want to do, explore what’s going on in the particular industry you are interested in. Read news related to your chosen area and look out for information about which products are currently popular, what the latest innovative ideas are and developments that influence the industry. The information on market trends can be accessed most easily in the specialised sections of publications such as ‘business’, ‘tech’, ‘lifestyle’, ‘environment’, ‘travel’ etc. However, you can get more specific and valuable information if you invest in an industry journal, website or newsletter from a professional body. Podcasts are also a great source of information, thought leadership topics, not to mention a great help for your own business.
Understand your industry
Learn the ins and outs of your chosen sector and focus primarily on the things you find most difficult. Improving your knowledge and skills at the beginning will set you up for quicker business success. Sometimes the perceptions of how a professional life in the industry looks entirely different than it is. Every road to success has its challenges, and as you learn more about your chosen industry, it will be easier to envision what kind of issues you may come across and what it might take to overcome them. Mentors are great for this but as a minimum start listening to podcasts from people in the industry.
Business start up List
Write down a list of the main tasks you will need to handle when operating your own business. The basic list could include activities such as: attracting clients, managing customers’ inquiries and complaints, writing proposals to potential sponsors, premises to operate from, reliable suppliers, business taxes, complying with legal requirements in your chosen business sectors, educating yourself about the industry, obtaining necessary certifications and more.
Pitch your idea to pro’s
Once you have a concept that is well-thought out, the ultimate test of its worth is trying and selling it to someone. Creating a successful pitch requires effective brainstorming and strategy, so ensure you take all the necessary steps to do so. A pitch can have various forms; you can write a donor letter, do a presentation or fill in an application for a business grant.
It’s not all action
It’s well established that the quick-mover advantage is highly overrated, and history is littered with successful second or later movers.
So if it is not your idea, then your execution is going to be the critical factor in whether you become the number one or an also-ran.
So what do we mean by ‘good execution’? We’ll cover that in our next post.
Good Execution
Looking at the execution hurdle, this is where many good ideas decay through poor execution. Quick-mover advantage is highly overrated. Take Facebook as an example; it wasn’t the first social network, but often success is about being that little bit better across hundreds of activities rather than the big idea itself.
If you want your business to succeed then a good product and ambition are not always enough. Strong execution, rather than a bright idea, is vital to the success of a business. Running a successful business is never easy, but with the right attitude and the right approach then it is entirely possible. When you do make mistakes- learn from them. There is nothing wrong with experiencing failure so long as you learn from it.
Jump in and get started
It seems like most aspiring entrepreneurs delay acting on an idea until all of the stars aligned. I am no astronomy major, but it seems like that rarely, if ever, actually ends up happening. Procrastination is the killer of most ideas and businesses. Think big. Start small. Small actions are better than nothing and will help you gather momentum.
Start small, dream big.
Working from home should be considered especially for small businesses and start up where possible. This may significantly reduce your capital requirements. A significant portion of your capital, when starting a business, is allotted to the rent or purchase of office space. Hence, by working from home, you we may be better able to meet your financial requirements when laying down the foundation for a start-up. You may transform one of your spare rooms into your workspace or use a secluded space in your home as your office.
Adorn the space with rented or purchased office furniture to fulfil the requirements of your workspace.
Self funding & budgeting
Self funding can either be your own capital funds from savings, etc or find a friend/parent/family/partner to provide some capital. Failing this, look for advances from distributors, vendors or even government grants. You do not always need £50k in the bank to start a business. ‘Go in’ with a web developer or offer a key supplier an equity share in return for 60 days credit. Some of the most impressive pitches we have seen are people that say “this is what I have done with £500, so imagine what I could do with some serious investment!”
Register with the HMRC
Make sure that you register with HMRC, as soon as you establish your business, to avoid any possibilities of getting penalised. Its an easy thing to postpone and forget about but this can cost you dearly later on, so make sure to get your financial ducks in a row from the beginning!
Create a brand
Once you have a product, you want people to be able to remember it and speak about it as early as possible that why you need to create a brand: find a name and hire a designer to create a brand identity. Communicate about the product and the mission on relevant website and social platforms, so you develop awareness and get feedback. Provide all the information they need to your first visitors; they are your future advocates.
Create your home on the web
Starting a business in the present age without launching a website, can be suicidal for your business. Online presence plays a significant role in the success and survival of a start-up business and to increase the chances of your success, you may pay sufficient attention towards making your website appear professional and appealing to your customers.
Engage with communities
Entrepreneurs do this ALL the time. With about a £50 investment, anyone can run an initial market test and get immediate feedback. Playing with paid advertising might seem daunting, but Google and Facebook have gone to great lengths to keep it simple. Especially if you are only using two or three of its most fundamental features.
If you already know where your target audience gathers, feel free to go even leaner. Engaging directly with a community is a powerful way of collecting quality insight, when and if you can get away with it. Sometimes, all you need to do to is ask.
Offer a free trial or free samples at the start
Hearing that you shouldn’t charge for your services may sound stupid, but it has worked for so many successful businesses that continue to give their services away for free. This strategy isn’t for everyone but it allows you time to build an audience for your business and engage customers for feedback to improve the service or product.
You can also explore giving a free trial; people are always looking for freebies, so offering your products or services free of charge will provide you with an excellent opportunity to gain some honest opinions. If you want to sell food, you can contact organisers of various community events in a local community centre and offer them free catering. If you are going to open a consulting business, post a classified ad providing your services for free to a specified number of people on a first come first serve basis.
Think about how your business could use these strategies to improve your community, offering and reviews, then use the wisely. Offering something small now could accelerate your business by years.
Sell your product in an unfinished state
Believe it or not, there are customers out there who are willing to pay for an unfinished product or service so that they get to use it earlier than others.
Online businesses which create software can benefit the most from this strategy. They can release their unfinished software to zealous customers and can get valuable feedback from them. This feedback can help them tweak the final product before the release date arrives.
Keep your costs low
This should go without saying really but it is a really common mistake SMB’s make which either sinks their business or keeps them from growing. You may want to consider the employment of various strategies to reduce your costs and capital requirements.
For example, you may think to work from home to save the cost of renting or purchasing an office space. You may convert a spare room into your workspace, adorning it with suitable furniture or you may find a secluded space in your home to work without any distraction.
Another way to reduce costs is to hire freelancers who may agree to work on a salary that you may find affordable. Consider hiring part-timers, and by saving costs, you may be able to meet your other financial requirements. It’s not just about saving the pennies, saving your time is crucial too. You should focus on business critical and money generating tasks but anything admin that consumes time should be consider for outsourcing, your time is more expensive than the few pounds it would take for a freelancer to do through fivver or up work for example.
Put systems and procedures in place
HMRC requires that all businesses keep clear and logical financial records, so put technology to good use and simplify all systems and processes.
While on the subject of technology, you might want to consider whether business needs are being met by your current software. If not, have a look at industry-specific management information packages. They will support business growth by providing real-time data that offers agility should your market change.
Hire the right people at the right time
Ideas themselves are not worth much, it is the people behind them that matter most. So if you have got people onboard who do not share the same vision then change them. You need to hire a winning team, so surround yourself with your own ‘A-team’.
Hiring full or part time staff isn’t always the right thing to do, sometime just hiring freelancers for the odd job or having an online EA (executive assistant) will do the job without the extra overheads of actually employing someone immediately. Once your business is in hyper growth and generating some big profits then you can start filling some full time and part time positions.
Test, adapt, reiterate and pivot
In this series of business advice points, I’ve mentioned this many times. When launching a business, product or service, feedback is crucial but what you do with the feedback is even more crucial.
Build, test, iterate, reiterate, pivot.
Frequently the new product/service that a businesses bring to market will not meet market needs, it may be close but doesn’t hit the right spot. Every business ever created has changed direction at some point, it is impossible to predict every single step that needs to be taken accurately.
Have a long-term goals
Performance metrics should always extend beyond short-term revenue. Too often do entrepreneurs focus upon instant short-term results rather than building a business. Focus on making a sustainable business model, not a ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme.
Generate growth & revenue
A business which isn’t generating revenue is not a business; it is an expensive hobby. Revenue, customers or a clear go-to-market strategy are important benchmarks of success. Business is about money, anything else is binary until making money is automatic in your business. Once revenue is coming into your business it’s time to start looking at systems and processes to managing this so it becomes as slick and smooth as possible. Manual intervention and personal customer engagement should only take place if necessary and if it adds value to your customer and business. If not, automate it with technology or self-serve.
Be strategic with marketing
It is tempting to run paid marketing campaigns. However, it can also be pretty expensive, and unless you can implement defined marketing goals that are measurable, then it can become a drain on your capital. You need to define the marketing funnel and determine the relationship between your conversion rate and your customer acquisition cost. After this then monitor it all very carefully.
If this seems alien to you, don’t worry it does to many that aren’t in marketing then please feel free to reach out and ask for advice from me or anyone of the Purple Yak team.
Focus on the product or service
Spend a lot on your product. Money and time. Build, test, iterate, reiterate and pivot. You know the rest.
This is where most of your capital (time and money) should be spent. Both on product cost and salary costs.
When launching, getting to your minimal viable product or MVP for short is the goal. After this you’ll be able to get customer feedback so you know what to improve, remove and add to your product or service so that customers will be biting your hands off to consume your offering.
Outsource tasks
An excellent way to retrench expenses and boost profits is to outsource a major portion of your business. This can diminish the need to hire people on full-time and save time and money spent on recruitment. Outsourcing tasks to international companies with cheap labour can greatly trim down costs. Be careful though to not to sacrifice quality so carefully consider who you hire, maybe look at testing their capability first by setting them small task to see how they perform.
Nothing is impossible
You will never succeed in business if you do not feel compelled to work hard for your achievements. Doing anything by half measures will only get you halfway to success.
Elon Musk, love him or hate him, is the definition of nothing is impossible. He dreamt from a small age about space and the exploration of it. He’s built his fortune and businesses that have helped him move into the space industry with the launch and growth of Space X. Dream big but have a plan to get to that dream, as the old adage goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
NEVER give up
No one likes seeing a business fail. So why do most startups fail? Contrary to popular belief, most businesses do not fail because they run out of money. Yes, cash flow is often the reason that the business ultimately closes, but the number 1 reason that most businesses fail is that the founder quits. Be it a loss of faith, loss of interest, loss of innovation, however you see it; it is the founder’s mentality that almost always fails the business. I’m yet to see a failing business that can’t be saved, if you have a business that’s failing then get in touch and let’s save your business together.
Build a team built for success
When you’re in real growth mode, this is the biggest lever you can operate in your business so you should be putting your weight behind it. It is exceptionally easy to lose focus the faster you are growing. You have a million and one other things to distract you, your recruitment volumes are increasing, and you have more pressure to ‘fill seats’, not having enough people looks like one of the leading barriers to growth.
Hire for drive and motivations, not just experience. Some people are driven by the need to succeed; these are the people you want. Make sure their motives are in line with yours.
Be involved and keep your standards high.
Always remember it is a two-way process. The best people will be being wooed by other companies. Still make sure you sell the benefits of working with you and move fast to secure the best people.
Don’t interview. Use motivational tests and practical exercises as much as possible. Interviews and experience have been shown time and time again to be the worst indicator of future success. Go further than checking a CV.
Hire people that are taking a step up in their career to join you. Question the motives of people making a sideways move – do they have the drive, and will they be challenged sufficiently to be engaged?
Evaluate and tweak your marketing
Are you doing any marketing? Do you see results? It is essential to identify which marketing channels work best for your business – maybe that is social media or local advertising – focus on the one that bring the best results.
Tracking those results is crucial to understanding your target market’s response to various channels, and thanks to the availability of online data, its never been easier to see where your efforts should be concentrated.
With Pareto’s principle of 80:20, 80% of sales will come from 20% of your customers. Use this to your advantage by focusing marketing efforts on this lucrative section of the customer base.
It’s extremely important when trying to maximise your marketing efforts and money that you test ads to see what works best for your potential customers. We use a 2:4:4 system to test our marketing efforts as we also do for our clients. If you want to know more about this, please check out our other videos and blog posts which talk through this system.
Regularly check and manage your businesses finances
Your business plan may be neglected and gathering dust, but by updating it with current and projected figures, it will help to focus the mind and provides a specific target to aim for.
Analyse cash flow and profitability for the year using budgeted and actual figures, as variances can reveal potential problems that may have gone unnoticed in the hectic day-to-day reality of business life.
Being in control of your spending is key to your financial success but the cost is as important, you can be making all the money in the world and spending more. Make sure, whether you like it or not, to know where you are at financially, where your going and have it tracked closely by yourself, even if you have a CFO.
Target the right audience
Plenty of small businesses do not run sufficiently targeted campaigns, though many people know that targeting is one of the primary advantages of online advertising if done well.
It is critical to building up a profile of your demographic and potential and past customers, the better your information, the more targeted your campaign will be, and the best results you will achieve. Your messaging also needs to be aimed at specific demographics and groups to maximise interest and ultimately your conversion rate.
Communicate with your team
From my experience, it is impossible to over communicate.
You need to make sure everyone knows the direction you are going with your business and has a chance to input (positively and negatively) towards achieving it.
If you dismiss someone’s feedback or suggestion, it is highly unlikely they will make another. You do not have to agree with everything, but you have to listen carefully and explain your decision to them appropriately.
Build a great company culture
A strong team of A-players will work to keep a business going, especially if they are invested in the company and want it to succeed.
Founders need to create the best environment for their teams, which once profits are being generated will make the external funding situation mostly irrelevant.
Remain agile and innovative
If you have hired the right people with clear objectives, proper responsibilities and flexible process, you have created the platform for innovation.
This is something you have to work at continually within your business to ensure it doesn’t become stale. You need to tell people that you value innovative solutions, and you should ask people what are they trying that is new. Let them know that there will be some failures along the way; it is your role to encourage the right mistakes.
Learn to change direction
Build, test, iterate, reiterate, pivot. We’ve covered this several times already. Most of the time the first product that a business brings to market will not meet the market need. Every business ever created has changed direction at some point - it is impossible to accurately predict every single step that needs to be taken to take a concept from a business plan to an IPO.
Create and publish great content
Blogging and creating great content is key to your long-term success online, beyond PPC (pay per click), content can be far more effective long-term. You can create tip collections (such as this series of business advice), best practices for your market or a top 10 list. There’s a bunch of creative content marketing ideas you can find online as well as the basic rules of content marketing for small businesses.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable
No one ever created or did something great whilst they were in their comfort zone. Being comfortable feeling uncomfortable in business is a must. You’ll do things you’ve never done before, you’ll be great at some stuff but be bad at other business tasks. Ever wanted to avoid making a call or have a difficult conversation with staff or a customer? These are the uncomfortable situations you need to become comfortable with. The more you avoid them, the more it will cost you in time and money.
Make marginal gains
Find some areas where you can be better than the competition and the accumulation of all those small advantages tips the balance in your favour. You cannot just hope that you will hit on one big idea that will defeat the competition, you need to be 1%-2% better in many areas.
Product innovations are very sexy but high risk: you may think you are acquiring a competitive advantage with some new offering or feature, but you may not be. I am not saying don’t try to innovate. By all means try new things, test if they work and keep them if they do. However, don’t think you can innovate your way to success.
Make small improvements to processes
To benefit from the aggregation of marginal gains, look at your company’s processes and look for the areas where you can get these small improvements.
Can you provide incentives?
Can you get people to work a little bit harder, can you introduce more efficient work practices that gives your staff a little more time to get more done?
Can you improve your recruitment – maybe by selling the company vision better in interviews, making the process shorter, sending a gift to people you want to offer a job to stand out from other offers they may be getting?
This is just a short list; there will be lots of tiny improvements that will all stack up.
Often these improvements are not sexy and glamorous: they are about digging deep into the detail of how your business works. Bear in mind that the best place to look for ideas may not be your competitors. Look much further afield.
Remove yourself
You are only one person, therefore you can only grow to your own bandwidth. You should slow remove yourself from the operating of your business.
This is a good thing to do for several reasons…
Your business won’t stop: if you go on holiday, takes days off, illness, etc. you don’t want your business to stop trading just because life taking a priority
You’ll reduce the risk of burn-out: if you’re the fuel and engine of your business then you’re going to burn yourself out. This isn’t good for you or your business.
You don’t become the thing holding your business back: being the bottle neck in your business is one of the main reasons why many small businesses fail to grow or struggle to grow sustainably and consistently.
You’re undervaluing your business: If you come to the stage where you want to exit your business and it comes time to value and then sell your business, a prospective buyer will only want to buy the business if you come along with it. Prospective buyers try to avoid ‘key man risk’ scenarios, and if the business relies upon the founder, then a sale is made much harder.
Automate everything you can
Can you get a system or software to perform some bits of the job? Even if you are not able to take advantage of your businesses inherent scalability, the important thing is that the potential is there for you to tap into at some point – so that either you or a future owner of the business, can take advantage of it.
Analyse your past
Only by looking back and analysing what worked and what didn’t, can you honestly understand how to move the business forward?
This involves looking at profit levels, sales figures, marketing results – anything that provides valuable insight into how you have attained your current market position.
Thinking about core products or services, it is worth considering which ones deliver the highest profit margins, how you might improve them, and which are not performing well – maybe you could do things differently to lower operational costs?
Join business networking groups
It is advisable when growing a business; you may join a community or a relevant support group to gain adequate assistance and increase your exposure. The acquired support can be of significant help, especially if you lack the experience of working in the industry you plan to start a business in.
By joining these support groups, you will be able to have access to numerous advantages these have to offer, which include free meeting spaces, comfortable and convenient approach to various networking events, discounts for various business and marketing services and solutions or even viable legal advice.
Time management
Time is your most valuable asset, the one thing in life you can’t get more of once it’s gone. Using time to the best of its ability is crucial to your businesses success but more importantly your happiness.
Your current approach may appear acceptable but you could still be wasting heaps of precious. Stuffing your schedule will not help, instead sort out and arrange your tasks priority-wise. Formulate a strategy and devise a contingency plan to scrap off useless stuff from your list.
Writing errands down also helps, it saves mental energy in recalling things that need to be done, and the brain focuses more on getting them done on time. Furthermore getting up early adds time to your daily routine. Award yourself with breaks after small time intervals; refresh your mind my stretching or walking around.
One great tip I got from one of my mentors at the start of my first business, tackle the hardest, most time consuming, biggest challenge task first. By finishing this first, generally in the morning, you feel a sense of relief and achievement which gives your a dopamine burst which makes you feel good. This is a great platform to have a really productive day and as an added bonus the hardest, time consuming and challenging task isn’t on your mind whilst you procrastinate on it.
Adopt a morning routine
A morning routine helps to get the mind fired up to deal with the pressure that awaits you.
Taking out a specific amount of time every morning may seem a lot to take in, but it gets the mind warmed up and ready for action. Our brain takes time to cope if we get up in the morning and head to work.
Start with an easy morning routine. This makes it simpler to follow and retain in the long term. Your morning routine may include walking or cycling to work, meditation, sitting silently for some time in the morning, having a pleasant breakfast, and exercising. All these help to ensure the physical health and result in getting tasks accomplished.
Give your tasks a time-frame
By writing your tasks in front of you, you will be able to gauge the amount of time you can spend on each activity and work more diligently to complete quality work in the given time.
Next to each task, write down the number of hours or minutes that you will spend on that task today. While it may take a while to determine how much time any particular task needs, it does not have to be exact, just relatively realistic. Time-frames are like baby steps.
Protect and improve your sleep
If you want to sleep more hours than you work, you should make sure you are sleeping at least eight hours.
Just as you can be creative with your work hours, sleeping hours do not have to be amassed in the eight-hour blocks that we think they do. All over the world, siestas, reports and nap-times allow adults to reach their full eight hours of shuteye and wake up feeling refreshed and refocused. Even Google offers nap rooms, recognising it increases techie productivity!
If you are more partial to the traditional nighttime slumber, however, try setting a timer rather than an alarm, counting down from an ideally consecutive eight hours at lights out.
Eat well, hydrate, maybe meditate 🧘♂️
Being focused, efficient, and productive requires being in shape, both mentally and physically. You will need stamina and nourishment to make it through an optimised work day, and mental clarity to tackle each task with conviction.
Breakfast is an absolute must, and even chocolate and coffee are recommended in modest quantities. Eating healthy food improves focus, and staving off dehydration is an excellent way to keep energy up.
You don’t have to become the next Mo Farah, going for walks on a daily basis has been shown to improve focus and improve mental health.
Work to workout
One of the best breaks you can take is an exercise break. Reserve at least 30 minutes in the middle of your work day to get the heart rate up and the blood pumping to the brain. It will stimulate creativity, relieve stress and increase alertness.
Fitting in exercise is immensely positive in every possible way. After a workout, when you are back in the work chair, you will be less antsy, less distracted, and more productive than when you started.
Treating your body as a business asset may sound strange but it has logic. If you are in poor health, you may not be able to give your business the attention it needs. Keeping track of your diet and exercise can help you to stay fit. Other techniques such as meditation reduce the stress that you are subjected to daily.
Be kind to you
Don’t forget to have fun, learn to lighten up. Stress can be a difficult habit to get rid of. Ensuring that you have enough joy in your life can help to alleviate this.
Surround yourself with positive people
Hang out with positive and inspiring like-minded people, such as other entrepreneurs and mentors. These people will enable you to think more positively, connect you to the right people and come up with creative solutions to the issues that you are dealing with.
Keep positive
Eustress is positive stress when you feel excited and engaged. Eustress is the fight response in our fight or flight response. Eustress makes you feel good and enhances productivity, but be aware that too much has the same effect as too much stress. It can lead to harmful stress and a rollercoaster of highs and lows. Use the eustress to be productive but ensure you take time out to relax and calm down.
Motivate people
Leaders are not just people who throw around orders. Leaders also act as mentors, confident and most especially a coach to their team members. You should be able to boost the morale of your team and make them believe in their capabilities individually and as a team. This means you have to use specific tools to bring out the best in each of your team members and the only way to do this is by knowing them and what they are capable of doing more in-depth. Only a great leader will be able to do this because it requires a certain degree of natural touch and management skills to be able to motivate individuals.
Make your goals achievable
Are they achievable with the human, financial and technical assets at your disposal? The key to answering this is honest with yourself. Think about your actual skills and experiences.