Never cease to learn

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Bikky Khosla | 29 Jul, 2014
Learning is a never ending process - this rule applies also to business. But many small business owners, after achieving a certain level of success, do not bother to give much thought to learning new things - about their customers, the markets they serve, the business strategy they follow, and so on. This is a wrong approach. These days, everything in the world of business is changing fast, bringing new opportunities as well as challenges, and to deal with them one must keep on learning.

Business people usually measure their success in terms of revenue. When they think about success, what first comes to their mind is their balance sheet and client base. Profitability and number of customers are two common barometers we use to measure how successful we are in our entrepreneurial ventures. This is fairly common sense - to survive and thrive we cannot help but take care of these things. But this does not mean that profitability is everything. A loss could be around if we fail to continue learning.

In business there always remains a scope to learn about what is working and what is not - which of your strategies are working well and which are not, which of the efforts are successful and where you are just wasting your time, which areas require improvement, how to enhance customer satisfaction, what can be done to add further value to your offerings, to improve marketing and promotion, and so on. Getting answers to these questions does not require much effort but only an organized approach.

An effective way to increase understanding about your business is to constantly monitor the key aspects of your business, classify the queries into some distinct areas such as products, customers, marketing, market trends, advertising and promotion, etc. Periodic evaluation of these aspects helps to correct the past mistakes, adapt to changing customer tastes and market trends, and sharpen business competitiveness.

Success and learning are the two sides of the same coin and therefore focus should never be shifted from the latter. In case of most of our entrepreneurs, however, the learning efforts slow down gradually with every passing year. Learning becomes a back-bench subject and all the focus is shifted to the cash register instead. There is no doubt that revenue and profitability matter most in any business, but this by no way means that learning should be put aside.

I invite your opinions.