7 Valuable Business Lessons I Learned from Experience

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

I have learned many lessons in my  years in business that  may help you.  Many of the lessons came from mistakes or failures along the way. Some of them came purely from years of experience.

I have owned several businesses either with my husband or other partners. The businesses were varied and include accounting practice, financial services practice, marketing financial products, farm machinery dealership and promoting speakers.

I did say they were varied.  🙂

I have also learned that business is business and skills can be transferred.  They apply equally to a home based business.

Here are  7 valuable business lessons I have learned

1. People are basically good and want to achieve. Overall that is my expedience.  Often you have to believe in someone until they can believe in themselves.

2. The customer is NOT ALWAYS RIGHT.  Here is what I mean. When I was a CPA if I had taken some of  my clients ideas on tax laws they could well have been in significant trouble. That is why they were paying me. I was the expert.

I am sure the saying “The customer is always right” is intended to mean do not argue with your customers. Do not make them wrong. Do not be superior and talk at them.  I agree with that.  It is  our role in our business to ask questions and educate.

Many people have an incorrect understanding of the network marketing business as an example.  We can turn that around in many cases by asking some questions.

3. Success is not always sweet.  What should have been one of my greatest successes in a business turned out to be a nightmare. It was a new business without systems properly in place to handle large volumes. Rather than get set up systems first  I went out and promoted the business  like crazy.

We were selling a financial product which had a limit on how many sales we could make.  Because our systems were not accurately counting our sales  we significantly oversold our number.

Our euphoria on sales flowing in was short lived when we had to return many applications and checks.

We had a number of unhappy clients.

The lesson I learned was there is a balance between selling and delivering.  Selling something without any systems to handle it can be just as bad as spending all your time setting up systems and having no sales.

4. Change is inevitable.  We must be able to change and adapt quickly. Tax laws change and regulatory body laws change.

I will not tell the story of how I learned this lesson here as it is a blog post of its own. I will simply say we had a very big “learning experience” when the taxation laws in Australia were changed retrospectively.  We should have seen it coming but we chose not to look at the inevitable.

You must be prepared for change.

5. Your team is critical to your success. By your team I am referring to more than your team in your business or employees in a traditional sense.  Your team is also your support network including your accountant and other advisers that will support you.

The need for the wider team grows as your business grows. Choose carefully.

“Finding good partners is the key to success in anything: in business, in marriage and, especially, in investing.”  Robert Kiyosaki

6. Relationships are key. This of course means with our team and our extended team.
Having good relationships with people who read our blog posts is important.  Joint ventures and centers of influence are a great way to do business.

Nurturing relationships is something I learned in a positive way.

7. The quality of the questions you ask  is fundamental to success.  In my days as an accountant people seemed to readily accept advice. When I  entered with world of financial planning I soon learned my success was dependent on the quality of the questions I asked.

The same is true in network marketing and many sales roles.