Lessons to Learn from Successful Business People

When Americans think of successful business people, we tend to imagine powerful men and women with great wealth, incredible charisma and presence, and tremendous power and influence.

While this is mostly accurate, if you speak with a business leader one-on-one, you’ll get to learn that they attribute their success to helpful mentors, hard work, and practical approaches to challenges. Here are some common tips, uncommon leaders share with entrepreneurs.

Great leaders shoot for the stars. Many successful business people are part entrepreneur, part salesperson, and part mad scientist. This helps them succeed where others may fail.

If conventional wisdom says an idea is crazy or hard, these leaders would respond that it’s crazy or hard until someone figures out how to do it. They always seek to be that someone.

While long term, big vision is critical to being a successful business leader, no company gets anywhere without clients. Christopher Sarofim, a fund manager, director, and advisor to several financial firms, could not have risen through the ranks without providing incredible customer service to the investors he represented.

If trust is built with companies, customers will be your biggest evangelists, singing your praises to family and friends. Unfortunately, it works the other way, too. If they have a bad experience, they will not only be hard to win back, they may take away customers or clients.

While spectacular customer service may not guarantee success, there is no scenario where it can hurt.

While “money isn’t everything” sounds antithetical to entrepreneurs looking to succeed, no less an authority on the subject than billionaire investor Warren Buffet is quoted as saying “Success isn’t measured by money.” Buffet goes on to say that love of family and friends is important.

You may think it easy for someone with immense wealth to say, but it doesn’t hurt to consider that of all legacies you leave at the end of your life, the impression you’ve given family and friends will outweigh the financial impact made. Work hard, but make time for people you cherish.

Innovation walks along with vision in the business world. On its surface, many people think of innovation as breakthrough technology; the creation of something that’s never existed. That’s certainly a great example of innovation, but innovation can also be much smaller.

Opportunities to innovate present themselves nearly every day in the form of processes that could be streamlined, paperwork or organization systems that can be more efficient, or approaches to common tasks that are not yet tried.

The trick is to adopt an innovation mindset, where you see every challenge and obstacle as an opportunity to meet it with a new tactic. You won’t always find a solution, but when you do, it can make life a little easier around your company at least, and, at best, change the world!

To be clear, business leaders need to welcome and reflect upon constructive criticism. Backlash is not same hing. They say success breeds contempt, and if you are in a position of power, you will spur some ill will from resentful haters, be they colleagues, competitors, or internet trolls.

Leaders must have thick skins and allow unproductive negativity to roll off their back without dignifying it with a response.

Successful leaders have stories of their failures, and most of them are more than ready to share them. This is because they learned lessons from them. They recognized the value of learning from failure, and used the experiences to avoid same mistakes and grow.

Success is dependent upon being open to, and reflective about, the situations business leaders are in every day. How they grow and learn, is directly proportional to their achievements.