Welcome to Oarbe’s first B2B article.  Helping businesses gain more business. It is observed by professionals who spend a great deal of time with small and innovative start  ups that there are certain common denominators observed between businesses that thrive and those that don’t.  With percentages of entrepreneurs starting up new ventures increasing yearly, a collaborative resource base is developing to provide key ingredients to generating successful  companies. Success can be determined and measured in various capacities, we at Oarbe shall begin providing information for start-ups with capital ranging from $2000-$20,000. Success for our sake will be measured as a company that sustains itself throughout the first three years of operations.  With statistics stating that 4 out of 5 companies go out of business before it’s tenth year of operations, there are various avenues and directions a small business owner may have at their disposal that they may not be aware of, yet can make or break the viability of their business and how long they can sustain it during critical times. It is Oarbe’s intent to provide the small business owner and moxy innovative start up entrepreneur with the vital tools that may be lacking in one area or another.  

Hey, let’s face it, if we were all brilliant C.E.O.s than the corporate world would be knocking down our doors to recruit us wouldn’t they? And don’t some of those big wig heavyweights make catastrophic and elemental foolish mistakes?  So, how can we get so hard on ourselves when we just have our basic high school, college or and university education that gives us a limited theoretical knowledge base on certain areas of an industry or skill. Or perhaps we are coming from a specialized field in the market place as an employee ready to run a similar business on our own.  One may find that excelling as an employee is a very different mindset than the high performance of a successful small business owner. We at Oarbe Team B2B shall on-goingly expand our resource data base of different industry insider tips and tools. Let’s start with the 4 Ps that are considered to be the backbone for many successful start ups. Print it and post it by your home office where your peripheral vision can trace the bold Ps by the side when viewing your computer screen. They are:

Passion

Preparation

Practice

Patience

Say it over and over until it sinks in, until even after your last breath on your panic stricken thoughts of caving before your business even gets a chance to make its first dollar or meet its first quarter; these Ps will not elude your mind, for you will need them. Think of them as a road map, a guide.

PASSION is like the reason for it all, the first date or the honeymoon, the easy to be excited, the adrenaline, the vision, the dream, the very beginning. This is the P that needs the least amount of description. Well, only until we get into sales and recruitment, that’s when this P will become more lengthy in description I am sure.

PREPARATION Due Diligence, Research, Homework, Market Research, Surveys, Stats, Reviews, Interviews, Profiling, SWOT Analyses. This stage must be the most overlooked and underdeveloped stage by most entrepreneurs. Where the characteristics of a bold innovator who takes risks and stands outside the norm of conventional practice and behavior come in handy to have the guts to begin their own business, most who fit this bill tend to lack in the area that could better support their drive with facts, making their visions or dreams more practical and probable, than improbable, to impossible, or at the very least unlikely.  Note: When you are at this phase and you start to doubt your initial excitement through the FACTS that are coming up, don’t throw in the towel just yet, THIS IS NORMAL. Personal growth is a necessary process when ending one journey and beginning another.  Viewing a start up is very similar to this process of personal growth. Where you find a problem can be an 8 out of 10 (10 being catastrophic) try and see that to someone else your current problem at 8 might be a 2 to someone else.  Seriously, when you can start to have a different perspective, you can open up to the new ideas that can set in place to not only solve these current problems but the purpose of them are often to lead us to the greater new possibilities. If you hang in there, you might just grasp what these nuggets of opportunities might be. 

PRACTICE This gets harder, a lot of decisions change in the preparation stage for it gives more insight, strengthening certain hunches and depleting others.  Where preparation is the area of finding existing facts, practice is the execution and application of those fact-findings, or it is the decision-making and the application of those decisions. YOUR decisions, so at this phase there is definitely more on the line.  Not only your ideas, but also now your decisions. It takes a large commitment to stand by your own decisions, and this phase is not easy. When it is probably a new area of practice in your life as much as it is a new area of business, the pressures can feel overwhelming at times, but exercising your decisions is a muscle like any other, and the more you do it, eventually the easier it gets. You can even feel completely out of place calling yourself an owner or president of a company in networking seminars that you force yourself to attend. STAY IN THE ROOM, in the self-employment game, and you can see yourself in a sustaining business, possibly.

PATIENCE Here it is. Some say that underestimating math of sales (the number of times you have to go out and create leads to make one sale) is the major factor in businesses caving prematurely, others say managing cash flow (being more diligent in budgeting and living within ones new means, for the resources available are for business expenses that weren’t existent before starting one’s business, and one’s behavior must adjust to this new circumstance or one’s resources --cash going out- might deplete before new business generates healthy sustainable sales—cash coming in).  But these are skills and disciplines that can be learned the easy way or the hard way, and your virtue of PATIENCE is either going to coax you towards the easier way or keep you in there as you go through the hard way.  Either way, PATIENCE is the opposite of PASSION, and where adrenaline can be the energy that pumps through your veins to generate power and renewed life, PATIENCE is like nutrients from an I.V. tube that runs into your body if you are dehydrated or facing some other ailment; so look within your own virtues for nourishment as well as the many other sources that might be available when the going gets tough, IT IS YOUR OWN VIRTUES that can withstand the hardships so cultivate that virtue of PATIENCE, your business needs it.This article is a general overview of the 4Ps. Consecutive articles shall cover more comprehensive details of certain skills and areas related and integral to business success: Helping Businesses gain more Business, Oarbe is determined to provide relevant key tools and tips to small business owners and innovative start ups; giving them an edge to sustain their business and thrive in the growing market place.  Make your dream a profitable one!

Written by Mpyr