Five Steps to Building a Successful Business

New Course! Learn to correct depreciation errors using Form 3115

Topics Covered

Your New Career – The Business of Business
Defining Business Success
Traits of a Successful Owner
Skills Owner Success
Tips for Success
The Customer Experience
What Customers REALLY Buy
Finding YOUR Customers
Creating Your Value Statement
The Various Forms of Profit
Type of Profit Needed for Success
Profit and Taxes
Debt and Overhead
Direct Expenses
Finding Your Business Imperative
Break Even Unit Sales
Production Constraints
Break Even Price
Systems All Businesses Have
Importance of Systems
Success Systems vs. Habit Systems
Systems & The Golden Rule of Business
Systems & Time Management
Creating Efficient & Effective Systems
Employees & Systems
Working on Your Business
Importance of Your Minimum Viable Product
Business Success and Growth
Skill Development and Growth

Are you thinking of starting a business but are discouraged by the fact that most go under within a few short years of opening? Don’t Worry! Many owners achieve resounding success – And you can too! Do you own a business that hasn’t achieved its potential? Are you working every day, harder and longer than anyone you know, but barely making ends meet? Is paying your bills a week-to-week and month-to-month struggle?

There’s Good News! You can transform your business!

The Five Steps to Building a Successful Business is the product of 20+ years of working with small businesses and asking three simple questions:

Why do so many businesses fail?
Why do so many businesses that survive struggle to make ends meet? And
Why do so few achieve meaningful and lasting success?

In short, what makes a successful business different from one that struggles or fails? Surprisingly, the answers I found have very little to do with the business itself – it’s product, location, size, or funding – and nearly everything to do with the owner.

Successful business owners share five common traits. The owners of businesses that struggle or fail lack one or more of these traits.

Successful owners are not born; they get taught. The five traits are skills acquired from experience and intuition. You can learn these skills! And we teach them in The Five Steps to Building a Successful Business.

Actionable information you can apply immediately.

We teach The Five Steps to Building a Successful Business in 24 lessons spanning five hours. This course will help the following individuals maximize their business potential:

Those planning to open a business
Current business owners
Business incubators
College students & business departments
Vocational & Trade Schools
Craft & Trade Associations
Anyone interested in business!

What skills do The Five Steps to Building a Successful Business Teach?

The Business of Business - Successful Owners understand that owning a business is a career entirely different than the product or service they sell. Like any career, the Business of Business has unique challenges and success definition.
The Customer Experience – Customers have many choices to satisfy the same need or want as your business. They choose one option to the exclusion of all others for a reason. This reason? The Customer Experience. Successful owners know exactly who their customers are. And they construct their business’s experience around these individuals.
Make a Profit – Sure, all businesses need to generate a profit. What makes successful owners different is that they understand the type of profit that matters and how to make it, measure it, and maximize it.
Manage Systems, Lead People – All businesses have systems. Unfortunately, most are unintentional extensions of habit. What makes successful owners different is their ability to build efficient & effective systems around crucial business functions.
Own a Business (not a JOB) – Successful owners know that only a business can grow beyond them; a JOB cannot. Success requires working on their business, not just in it.

Lesson Listing

Here is a list of the lessons in this course and a brief description of what you'll learn in each lesson.

Introducing the Five Steps to Business Success
An introduction to the Five Steps to Building a Successful Business.
The Business of Business
Successful Owners realize (sooner or later) that when they start to offer their product or service for sale, they have embarked on an entirely new career – The Business of Business. Like all new careers, the Business of Business has its definition of success and skill set required to achieve it!
Defining Business Success
How do you achieve a goal if you don’t know what it is? What is a successful business? How does one measure their progress? In this lesson, we define our Goal – Building a Successful Business!
Who is a Successful Business Owner?
Building a successful business requires a specific set of skills. Skills you can acquire if you commit to learning the five steps.
Success Tips / Traits
This lesson provides helpful pointers to help you develop a business success mind-set as you delve into the next four steps!
The Customer Experience
Successful business owners understand a fundamental fact about their business. Customers have many choices to satisfy the same need or want as their product or service. They also know that the reason customers choose their company over all these choices IS what their customers purchase! Their product or service only gets their foot in the customer’s proverbial door.
Creating the Customer Experience
In this lesson, we introduce the value statement, the first step in creating your customer experience. We also start the journey to find the individual for whom you produce this experience, your customer!
Finding Your Decision Maker
Finding your customer is not as simple as it may seem. Your customer is a decision-maker in a profitable market who needs your product and can afford your product. In this lesson, we’ll share an example of how one business owner found their customer.
Your Value Statement
Once you find your customer, the next step in experience creation is to complete your value statement. We want to determine what your product or service does for that customer – Why they should choose your business over all other options!
Examples and Notes
Your value statement is the cornerstone of experience creations. In Lesson Five, we’ll share more examples of the customer experience created by different businesses. We’ll also reveal some essential tips to keep in mind as you develop your customer experience.
Make a Profit
Sure, your business needs to make a profit! But what does that mean? There is GAAP Profit, Bookkeeping Profit, Accrual Profit, Cash Profit, and Taxable Profit. The problem? None measure what you need to grow your business! Lesson one clears the clutter and introduces the type of profit you must generate to achieve success. Our goal, however, is your success - not to teach tax & accounting!
Profit and Personal Bills
Your business cannot achieve success until it pays all of its bills and your personal expenses - including an item many owners overlook. The lesson also introduces the various costs you must understand to measure success.
Debt and Overhead
If your business has debt, it must generate enough revenue to make the payments. It must also pay another type of expense called overhead or fixed costs. Businesses must pay for debt and overhead, even when not producing a product or providing a service.
Direct Expenses
Direct expenses (also called Variable Costs) are expenses required to produce your product or service. When you are not creating or supplying your product, you do not have these costs. It is essential that you understand these costs, primarily if your business sells a physical product.
Your Business Imperative
This lesson capstones lessons eleven through fourteen - completing your business imperative. A business imperative reveals the amount of product a business must sell at a particular price to generate profit.
Break Even Price
This lesson continues creating the business imperative by introducing production constraints. All businesses have production constraints that limit the number of units they can produce or customers they can serve. This fact means that most owners cannot compete on price. They must compete using their customer experience.
Manage Systems, Lead People
Don’t be afraid of the word “systems.” You already have them, and they are vital to business. Our goal is to help you recognize your “habit systems” and turn them into “success systems.”
The Importance of Systems
Successful businesses are a collection of systems that profitably and consistently deliver the same experience to a growing number of customers. It does this by making the best use of its most valuable asset. What’s your most valuable asset? You’ll learn in this lesson.
Creating Systems
Let’s start creating systems by introducing an essential business concept - the Golden Rule of Business! Then we examine core business functions and make sure they follow the Golden Rule as we start to transform habits into systems.
Formalize Processes Into Systems
This lesson creates steps and procedures to ensure that crucial business functions achieve their goal efficiently and effectively. We transform these steps and processes into systems.
Creating Product / Service & Employee Tips
Systems create your product or service. They also deliver your customer experience and form a platform for scalable growth. They are a prerequisite to hiring employees and effective leadership. Systems allow business owners to become leaders (coaches) instead of micromanaging herders of cats.
Own a Business (Not a Job)
Only a successful business can grow beyond you; a JOB cannot. If things fall apart in your absence, you do not own a business; you own a JOB. Except for a well-planned practice, possessing a JOB can be very dangerous and lead to an all to common trap, Survivor Mode.
Working on your Business
Building a successful business requires working on your business, not just in it. To help you achieve this end, we introduce a compelling concept called the MVP, Minimum Viable Product.
Congratulations! You're an Entrepreneur
Now that you have finished the Five Steps to Building a Successful Business, congratulations! You’re an entrepreneur! It is important to remember that each step of growth pull an owner further and further from their customers and requires new skills. So, if your goal is continual growth, devote yourself to continued learning in your business career!

All courses and articles are for informational purposes only and do not constitute tax advice. Taxes are complicated - do not act on course information without consulting a professional. Always refer to treasury regulation before making any tax decision. Read the full disclaimer.

Customers Say…