Patience, Persistence, and Practicality – The Three P’s of Business

| September 23, 2015

Patience, Persistence, and Practicality – The Three P’s of Business

There are several people out there that dole out advice on how to build our own start-up or what is required to ensure the success of a business. But even reading a thousand articles, listening to advice from dozens of well-meaning people won’t really prepare you for the realities of small business.

When you are reading or listening to advice, you will notice that these words keep popping up everywhere. Let’s see why patience, persistence, and practicality are important for starting your own business.

Patience

Patience is a Virtue is an age-old adage and it’s as relevant now as it was all those years ago. One might think that patience has no place here, especially when you’re starting your own venture. This is a time when you should keep pushing, keep moving forward without hesitation.

However, recklessly pursuing your goals won’t help you. If you have a brilliant idea for your start-up, it is patience that holds you back, forces you to exercise restraint, research the market, and the demographic before getting invested. You need patience to wait for the right time to launch your product. If you don’t exercise that restraint early on, you’ll live to regret it.

Look at the steps you need to take before you launch a business. You need to research your idea thoroughly first. You need to see if there’s a market for it, to check if your product or service fulfils a particular need. Once you’ve done that, you need to develop your product, establish groundwork, get financial assistance or investors, etc. All of this would require near saintly patience.

Persistence

Many people might consider persistence to be the opposite of patience. That’s not really the case. Persistence is to relentlessly pursue a goal without hesitation. It means to keep going on even in the face of failure. Successful entrepreneurs don’t give up until they’ve achieved their goals and even then they keep going.

If you haven’t managed to get investors for our business venture yet, keep trying. If it doesn’t work, find other ways to finance your venture. The will and the sheer tenacity to keep going against all odds is the key to success.

Small businesses don’t get traction easily. The first few months, even years of your business can be discouraging. You need to possess the grit to manage financial loss, lack of customers, competition’s success, and the stress that comes along with a start up to working at it. Eventually, your business would find its place, settle, and then start to grow.

Practicality

It won’t do to always be swayed by emotion. Sometimes, you need to have a cool head in business. You can’t take criticism personally and get offended, you can’t consider a problem to be a personal failure and let it bring you down. Most successful entrepreneurs are almost ruthlessly practical and honest with themselves.

In fact, they’re practical enough to see past any emotional attachments and understand if their business is failing. They can stop before they’re in too deep. These factors are the key to starting strong with your new venture.