My Business Success

As the newspaper salesman left, I sat there with my head in my hands wishing that I hadn’t opened my big mouth and told him about my dreams of success.  Here I was, 26 years old telling some newspaper person that I was aiming to build one of the most successful asset holding companies in my province within only 5-years. 

At the time it didn’t occur to me that one such business already existed in the area and that I didn’t know a profit and loss statement from an assets statement – Much less basic business practices in the industry.  However, I was young, assertive, and prepared to stake my claim in the big city, and I was ready to do whatever it took in order to build my company.  In any event, it was a freezing February in 1986 when I began to take my first steps toward establishing my business, and I began working to learn more about local commerce in the area.

Building

At the time my only thoughts were to build something for myself, and I deeply believed that if I did it right, I would create my career and build a bright future for myself as the owner of my own company.  However, I urgently needed to make some serious shifts, and I wrote down the goals that I had for myself – Regardless of the environment that I found myself in, I decided to believe that I could achieve my goals, even if I felt fearful and insecure about my prior experience and knowledge.  So, with conviction and passion I began creating appointments with the managers and property owners of a variety of assets in the area in order to explain my goals for their properties.  I began with the biggest #1 and #2 companies in the area, and they practically laughed me out of the offices and kindly asked me to leave.  Their belief was that they already had somebody providing them with the services that I wanted to render, so why would they possibly want to do business with me?

Persistence

They were already very successful and couldn’t see past their present situations and so seemed to be close-minded from the start.  However, after four months of near daily prospecting and sharing my vision, I received a positive response from a large property owner, and I knew after our first meeting together that this would be the largest deal of my very nascent career.   Within 30-days I was referred to the #2 company, which had not yet expressed interest, but I managed to secure an agreement for them rapidly open another business opportunity with me, which quickly began to expand.  Within my first year since securing our first major client, we grew to 97 sales agents, but still everywhere I turned, people thought that we would go bankrupt.  We didn’t.

Focus

Regardless of what they thought, I remained focused on my objectives, which provided me with the strength to overcome any challenge and any obstacle that I encountered.  I remained ready to put my personal power behind the growth and development of my company, which helped me to launch myself into sustained success. 

One of the keys to my success was in sharing with enough individuals the vision that I had for them and how much brighter and more successful their futures would be - That working together we could move them out of their month-to-month doldrums and create a new and more powerful future that would be more exciting and fulfilling.  Through this process I learned about the fundamentals of running a sound business, which included sales, returns on investment, legal practices, and financial management – All at once.  In time I grew the company to a 1,000 person operation, and we have since achieved a remarkable level of corporate confidence and success.

Remember - Clarity of objective, passion, and a consistent application of the best business practices has helped us to achieve massive success, and you can do this too.

- Anonymous Contributor