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Tips for Starting a Business for Veterans

Small Business

For veterans, business is taking that special gift that wants to be expressed and created, and offering it to the world. If you're considering starting your own business, here are three tips.

Have a Vision

If you don't know where you're going, you won't know if you get there. Whether you already have a business or you're just thinking of starting one, it is always important to set your vision and occasionally redefine it. When most people start a business, they want to be able to do creative work, stay at home, and just pay the bills. Seven years later, your goals may have shifted. Your vision now may be to have a healthy, thriving business that inspires joy and uplift you, your team and your customers. So things change with time and you have to reassess your goals. Understand chargeback meaning may help you to plan better.

Sit down at least once a year and really start dreaming. What would you want your business to look like a year from now or three years from now? This is hard for some people. You've got to ignore what is and dream of the ultimate. What would be the best and the most amazing version of your business? And remember, you do not have to know how. If you knew how right now, you'd already be doing it. Stop arguing in your mind that you don't know how. Nobody knows. Everybody has to figure it out as they go, so get crystal clear on your vision.

Turn Your Vision Into Goals

Chunk those goals up into bite size pieces and then pop those bite size pieces into your calendar again. Don't stress about the how at this point, or you will talk yourself right out of all those juicy plans that you have. Get away once a year for about 2 to 3 days and dream and scheme and really map out what you want the next year to look like. As you dream and scheme, you start planning and crystallizing those goals into action steps that you can take the next year. Once you have those goals, then have a business meeting once a week. Get your team together and start putting those goals into actionable steps. Put them in your calendars so that they actually get done. It sounds really simple, but it is hugely effective.

Take one big goal that you've been wanting to achieve and list out as many things as you can think of that will shift you in that direction. You don't have to have it all figured out. Just get those ideas down, then take those ideas and schedule them into your calendar and start doing those things. There's going to be days where you do not feel like it. But if you learn to relish discipline and really cultivate that as a habit, it's going to make it a whole lot easier. Today is the only day you will ever have, and it is the most important day. So go ahead and get started.

Plan Long Term

A common thing among new business owners is they get really excited. They start their business to get a few products going. They make a sale or two. But then they get super discouraged because sales aren't rolling in at the rate that they thought. There are some businesses that shoot through the stratosphere. For most people, that is not the case. It could take months. It could take years to really get your business established. This is why you have to have that crystal clear vision and the ability to break that down into goals and action steps. The days are going to get long and hard, the months are going to stretch out, and your business may not be where you want it in the time that you thought it would end up being there.

Business is not just about the money, it is about serving others. It's taking that special thing that's inside of you, that unique gift that wants to be expressed and created, an offering that to the world.

If you have comments or feedback about any article, please email your thoughts to info@acp-advisornet.org.

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