Every new entrepreneur comes to the realization that most business ventures take more time and more money that they had originally thought it would. It can also be extremely frustrating weeding through all of the red tape, the avoidable and unavoidable mistakes, the inexplicable roadblocks that pop up etc. On top of all that, finding the right team often means first working with some incompatible people who don’t make the grade for any number of reasons.

You may have some reasons of your own. Add them to the list. Some of these might not be driving forces for you at all. Take them off of the list. Then ingrain all of the ones that important to you in your memory. You might even make a poster of them to hang on the wall near your desk. Add personal pictures to the poster that represent the reasons you should stay the course. Pray for steadfastness. Remind yourself of these daily, and you will never give up!

    Ask any successful businessperson or business coach what the first step in starting a business or trying to grow an existing business is, and I would estimate that 9 out of 10 will say that you need to know where you’re going before you can set out to get there. You need to set goals. We have all heard it a million times; you can’t hit the target if you don’t know what or where the target is. So, we all set out like good little students and set our 1 year, 3 year and 5 year goals for our businesses. We look at our existing situations, scan the resources that we have access to, factor in our desired results, plug in some variables for steady growth, and we’re on our way.

   I think there is a major flaw in this kind of goal setting for many people, whether they are launching a business, moving an existing business to the next level, or have a talent to market. The challenge I see is that most people are used to thinking realistically within the confines of their own knowledge and the resources that are immediately available to them. They never consider what their business could look like if they had the right contacts, expertise, capital and other resources behind them, because they are not within their grasp right now. Let me give you some examples:

1.  A man who opens a new restaurant concept is concerned about making the restaurant successful, and nothing else. That’s an important goal to achieve. He may dream of opening another location across town. However, he doesn’t set out from the beginning to brand the restaurant, trademark the name, the logo, the trade dress etc. and develop a franchise that is sold worldwide. 
2.  An author self-publishes a book and sells it over the Internet. He dreams about getting it published for real some day. Any action toward raising capital and building a mega-business around the book, complete with TV, radio and other personal appearances, follow-up books, a syndicated newspaper column and maybe even hosting their own syndicated radio show based on the book never even enter the picture, because it all seems like just a pipedream.    
3. A local software development company comes up with a new product for small businesses. Their only goal is to sell more of this product, and they have salespeople pounding the pavement to do so. They should raise $500,000 from angel investors, form strategic alliances with international business-related organizations, license other related software under their brand name, develop follow-up products, market themselves worldwide, and establishes themselves as the go-to company this kind of software. However, because they don’t know how to raise capital, and they don’t have strong leads into the major organizations, and they are not familiar with branding, they just continue to pound the pavement.