So, you’ve decided to be an entrepreneur, which probably means it wasn’t a decision at all. You either ARE an entrepreneur or you are NOT.  Entrepreneurs guide their own destiny and build their own businesses using systems to facilitate intentional forward movement.

Entrepreneurs have vision. They feel things, they dream things and they let intuition guide them through both successes and failures. What really sets entrepreneurs apart is their ability to emerge stronger, wiser and even more focused on achieving their dreams after experiencing failure.

Entrepreneurs do not wait for instruction, they do not need someone to tell them what time they start work, what time they are off, how much money they are going to make or how quickly they will advance.

What entrepreneurs recognize is that they must focus on is continual self improvement and personal development. Just because someone possesses vision and desire does not necessarily mean they know how to manage their time, promote their business or balance their personal and professional lives.

A crucial part of being in business is having the ability to design and implement systems to regulate your business and make it easier to manage. Educating yourself on how others have run their businesses is very important. Anyone who is building a direct sales / mlm business has a wealth of places from which they can draw knowledge and ideas from experienced consultants.

Not only do they have their own upline and other consultants within their company but they can also draw upon the experience of consultants from any other mlm company as well. Remembering that it is not the product that will expand our business but the promotion of the business itself and team building, we are free to capitalize on the ideas and innovations used by any mlm company to incorporate with our own business.

There are many areas that need to be managed in order to grow a successful business, however, without breaking them down and going into the more specific areas of parties, customer service, bookings, hostess coaching, organization, recruiting and so on, we can very easily break down our business into 3 Major Categories:

1. Managing Your Customers
2. Managing Your Team
3. Managing Management (That would be you!)

In order to be able to continually build and manage your business, you must not only be able to keep up with its growth but also be constantly introducing tools with which to propel it continually forward.

To put this into perspective, think of it this way; imagine a young girl wanting to start a baby sitting business. She is an entrepreneur. She begins by taking a babysitting course, which educates her in her field. Then, she prints up flyers, posts them around her neighbourhood and delivers business cards door to door, dropping them in mailboxes around her neighbourhood. She soon begins to build a customer base and even starts to get referrals from her customers and starts to see growth in her business.

She keeps her clients names and phone numbers written on a piece of paper taped up by the phone and even takes the initiative to call anyone she hasn’t heard from in a while to see if they need her.

Now, suppose this girl decided she wanted to build her business even more and make more money than what she was making already.

What could she do? How could she expand outside her neighbourhood to a larger market?

Would posting flyers and hand delivering business cards to the surrounding neighbourhoods or the rest of the city or town be a solution? Of course not. As you can see, if she really wanted to expand more, she would need to use a more efficient means of advertising.

Now what could that be?

  • Local papers?
  • Online Classifieds?
  • Create her own website for her business?

The difference between her posting flyers and delivering business cards door to door and using one of these methods is that by using one of these methods, not only is she reaching a much larger audience, but these customers start coming to HER without her spending her time going to them. She is also then contacted by people interested in her services and not wasting her time and materials going to people who are not interested at all.

Now, after promoting her business even more, she finds herself flooded with requests for her babysitting services to the point where she can no longer handle the requests herself unless she finds a friend who can help her.

She also runs out of room on her piece of paper by the phone and is now recording the names and phone numbers of her customers on the side of her mother’s kitchen cupboard.

She begins to receive the scattered call now and then from customers stating that the friend she recommended did not show up for an appointment. To add to her stress, her friends are beginning to get upset with her because all of her free time is now consumed by her babysitting service and she never spends any time with them.

This girl needs to do 3 things:

1. Manage Her Customers
2. Manage Her Team
3. Manage Management (Herself!)

How can she manage to better keep track of her customers?

How can she ensure that her babysitting team is being reliable, professional and doing a good job so that her customers are happy and her business continues to build through more referrals?

And finally, how can she better manage her time to ensure a balance between her business and personal life? This girl needs systems, schedules and tools to get and keep her business on track.

To lay it out in black and white, if you are going to do business in the 21st century, you must have a 21st century business and use 21st century systems and tools. If you do not, you will reach a point where you will fall far behind the more modern, efficient entrepreneurs who truly know how to maximize and capitalize on all resources available to them.

Brandy Burge has been in direct sales for 6 years. She is in the top 10 consultants in Canada with Usborne Books at Home, a Sales Manager with Norwex Enviro Products, and proud owner of NorwexWebsites.com and DreamcatcherWebStudio.com. She does all of this with 2 small children at home.


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