The whole idea behind being an entrepreneur is that you’re in charge of your own destiny, with the road stretching out endless and free before you, and with nothing to hold you back but your own initiative, persistence, and willingness to learn from your mistakes and improve along the way.
Just about every entrepreneur dreams about becoming rich and successful, at some point in their career, but all too often that dream can die, and an entrepreneur can find themselves settling into a somewhat underwhelming but relatively comfortable routine, as soon as they start earning enough to pay the bills.
But what if you want to keep moving upwards in your professional life, in order to see just how far you can go with your business? How would you even go about it?
When you’re working HR jobs in big companies, you likely have a decent sense of what you need to do to be successful in your job. Entrepreneurs, however, often have to wing it.
Here are suggestions for constantly improving as an entrepreneur.
Seek out client and customer feedback
As an entrepreneur, you typically lack the yardstick of a boss, and employee performance reviews, in order to tell you how you’re doing and where you might be going wrong.
In the absence of these quality control and assessment mechanisms, you need to go straight to the source and seek out client and customer feedback.
Whenever you complete a project, follow up with your client. Get a sense of how satisfied they were with the experience of working with you, and with the end product, and cautiously identify things that you might have done better.
Asking your clients to fill in a short, digital questionnaire after working with you, can be a great help in this regard.
Constantly work to improve your professional brand
An entrepreneur’s success is heavily defined by the strength of their professional brand. If prospective clients look at your website and marketing materials and come away with a sense that you’re an effective and trustworthy professional in your field, you’re well on the road to iterative success.
If, on the other hand, people perceive you as amateurish or untrustworthy, it’s all downhill from there.
To move from strength to strength in your career, constantly invest in improving your brand. Get client testimonials and upload them to your website. Try to get guest blogs published on authoritative websites.
Do something each day to make yourself more attractive to prospects than you were the day before.
Stay up-to-date in your field — seek training on a regular basis
All professional fields are, as a rule, dynamic and changeable to some degree.
While you may enter into your entrepreneurial life with a solid understanding of your chosen field, it’s likely that new developments will arise from year to year which — if not taken on board — will quickly render your knowledge or skill set redundant, or at least put you in a bad position relative to your competitors.
Imagine the disadvantage someone would be at today if they had never adapted to the internet age and set up a website, for example.
To continue growing and succeeding as an entrepreneur, stay up-to-date in your field. Seek training on a regular basis, and take advantage of new technologies as they arise.