Discover two important mistakes to avoid.
Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses
I tend to disagree with the business advice that tells us if we aren’t good at certain things, that we don’t stand a chance with our business or working from home. Hogwash! The way I see it, we all have our own particular strengths and we need to play them up. We also need to be brutally honest about our weaknesses and find ways to help our business succeed even though we aren’t up every morning at 5 a.m. running on the treadmill or are able to carve 10 hours a day out to work on our creative business.
Use your strengths, find a workaround for your weaknesses and keep moving forward.
Plan ahead
This is one thing I still struggle with but it’s important. Think about it- magazines plan ahead and so do big retailers. Why do we think we can just “wing it”? Planning ahead ensures we at least have a frame to hang our winter holiday marketing on, a few blog posts in the queue for when we get sick or plenty of stock on hand for a last minute craft show. Planning ahead, working ahead and thinking ahead will save lots of heartache in the event of illness or surprise opportunities.
Know When to Stop
You’ve heard the saying “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” and sometimes we keep going and pushing when what we really need to do is STOP. Stop and take a break. Stop and re-evaluate. Stop and throw in the towel. Sometimes pushing through can cause more damage in the long run. My husband and I are still paying off debt for a business we lost at the beginning of the recession because we wanted to push our way through. We threw a last chunk of money at the failing business and when that didn’t help we stopped and shut everything down. It hurt but we survived to go on and start new businesses. That’s just how it is sometimes.
What mistakes have you made in your business and what have those mistakes taught you?
By: Vicki O’Dell, The Creative Goddess
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