Patience

Patience is a virtue for growth and profits in many small businesses. Although entrepreneurs want to grow fast with their new business plan and expect fast results, they need to be patient to see success. Having patience means you can wait peacefully because you have invested time, energy and money rather than getting frustrated, worried or disappointed.

Importance:

1. Results in small business may take time:

• Having small business might look easy, but with patience you can bring commitment to the business. This commitment helps in competing with other businesses in terms of products or services.

• For instance, when you start a cake business and people are generally not aware of what you do. So, you do strategic planning to market your business by making website, writing blogs on your website, advertising on Facebook, Instagram, sharing experiences and photos of customers and networking with people. Gradually, the number of viewers on website and followers on social media will start increasing helping to grow your business. This may take few months or years for results, hence patience is required.

2. Helps in building a winning culture:

• Culture is the environment where you spend most of your time. It is made up of values, beliefs, commitment, relationship and trust. When you build a better and winning culture in your business by introducing patience as one of the important traits in the culture, then people would love to come to work every day.

3. Make you ready for new challenges and competition:

• When you own a small business, there can be various challenges you face every day. With patience, you get strength to deal with the unexpected challenges. As a result, you will be ready for long term commitment to make your business successful as well as compete with other businesses in the market.

• For instance, you get an urgent order of making a birthday cake within half a day. Here, your patience will help you completing the order within time by maintaining quality standards and at the same time competing with other cake businesses for delivering in such a short duration.

4. Helps in negotiation:

• You require little patience if you need to win at negotiation. With patience and perseverance, problems can be easily resolved.
• If a customer negotiates for two-layer cake price for $400 which is originally $500, then your patience and determination will help in providing more information about ingredients and how much time it takes to make it and offer some concession on original price like price of $450 to have a win-win situation.

5. Helps in business networking:

• Many small businesses assume that handing business cards and telling about their business is business networking. But actually, it is two-way process. You need to know as many people and get them to know you, build relationship which takes time and patience to share information and ideas.
• Suppose, you attend a birthday party and network with many guests for your cake business. During this time, you are patient and confident to give your best. You may or may not receive any orders straight away. However, if you decide to keep exchanging information, you may receive wedding cake or muffins orders after few weeks or months.

6. Better customer service:

• Imagine the impact of being impatient when a customer complains about bad quality of your cake because if the top management can easily lose patience and can’t deal with a difficult customer, then how you expect your team to deal with them.

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