How you conduct yourself on a personal level almost always translates to how you conduct yourself on a professional level. This is the case for nearly any working professional, but it’s even more relevant for entrepreneurs or those running a small business. In fact, it’s incredibly relevant because you’re essentially tying your personal and professional lives together.
Touching On Entrepreneurial Values From Our Small Business Lending Company
In the age where any mishap with your business leads to a damaging negative review, it’s imperative that you conduct your business in alignment with several virtuous principles/values. Keep reading below at The Commercial Finance Group, your go-to source for asset-based lending and small business loans in Atlanta and Los Angeles, covers seven small business values that we believe are integral in running a successful company.
First And Foremost: Integrity
Though the same could be said about any of the values that we’re touching on below, integrity really should be a quality that everyone tries their hardest to abide by. Integrity, broadly speaking, concerns having strong moral principles in addition to being honest with those around you.
Throughout your time as a small business owner, you’ll come across many situations where you’ll have the option to lie, cheat, or take the easy way out for the sake of profit. You may even be able to do so without any chances of someone catching you. But whether you believe in karma or not, wrongdoings have a way of coming back to you, so choose to do the right thing — not for karma’s sake, but simply out of desire to uphold integrity through your business.
Empathy
Beyond pure honesty and morality in a general sense, you should be empathetic as an entrepreneur. You need to listen to the needs of your customers and your target market. You need to take their feedback to heart and use it to improve your products or services, especially when your company is in the baby stages of development.
The ability to understand where others are coming from is an invaluable tool, both in a personal and a professional sense.
Transparency
Hiding behind your customer’s backs is one of the easiest ways to breed distrust, especially in today’s digital age where businesses are subjected to more scrutiny and accountability than ever before. If someone has a great experience with a business, they’ll probably go on with their lives and won’t give their experience much thought. But a bad experience stemming from a lack of transparency? It’ll be hard for them to forget about it, and your company will receive a lot of backlash for it.
Be open and direct in your conversations, both online and in-person. Otherwise, things become too complicated.
Ambition
To paraphrase, our go-to buzzphrase at The Commercial Finance Group consists of the following: being a small business owner isn’t easy. The truth is that successful entrepreneurship is extremely challenging, and you’ll need to be quite driven in order to excel in this often cutthroat industry.
Be the type of person who makes things happen, not the type of person who watches things happen.
Accountability
Tire manufacturer Pirelli ran a famous ad back in the early 2000s that consisted of the following text: “Power is nothing without control.” They make a great point, and our small business lenders think that it applies in many different contexts, including entrepreneurship.
If ambition is your “power,” then “accountability” is your control. You’ll be busy as the owner of your own business for many different reasons, and some of those reasons are related to holding your coworkers — and yourself — in check. Create a culture where people aren’t resistant to accept responsibility for their actions, but completely willing to do so without a second thought.
Adaptability
Things change. If you’re launching a startup company in the tech sphere, you’ll notice that things change even quicker. You’ll need to adapt to different customer needs, volatile market trends, and so forth. Your experience will be nothing shy of dynamic and fast-paced, and your success as an entrepreneur is contingent on that.
You’ll encounter a lot of ambiguity when managing and growing your company. How well can you handle it? Don’t be frustrated by a lack of a clear direction, but instead, be energized by the possibilities that could arise from the situation.
Respect
Aretha Franklin said it best: “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.” Respect for your team, your customers (even when they’re blatantly wrong, and believe us, they will be!), your investors, and the resources you’re working with is absolutely imperative to success. Even the lowliest of corporate employees deserves to be treated with proper respect from a powerful CEO, differences aside.
Treating someone or something with respect isn’t just the right thing to do, but it will also make you and your company look favorable in the eyes of your customers. Conversely, lashing out and treating someone or something poorly will reflect quite poorly on you. We guarantee that this will come back to bite you in some fashion.
Your Bridge To Bankability: The Commercial Finance Group
At the end of the business day, we can’t control how you conduct yourself or run your business — that’s purely up to you! However, The Commercial Finance Group can help you obtain crucial working capital in a fraction of the time that it takes banks to deal out a small business loan. Ready to get started? Contact us today.
