James Ashwin: 5 Tips of Highly Successful Business Owners

Owning a business is one thing, but what’s the secret to ensure its ongoing and enduring success?

Newshub spoke to James Ashwin who owns Kakapo Business Sales, an award winning business broker who is doing extremely well in the business of selling businesses. He shares his expertise on the key personality traits he’s seen consistently appear in successful business owners over the years. During his career James has been underneath the hood of thousands of successful and unsuccessful businesses. Success tends to leaves clues and no matter what the industry of business - there are some common factors that, generally speaking, lead to business success. Here are James Ashwin’s top five tips.

1. Super-organised early risers

Successful business owners are always incredibly organised, they create lists every morning of things they must achieve and there seems to be a very consistent trend in not just successful business owners but successful people in that they're early risers. I highly recommend googling the 5am club and trying it for 30 days straight if you're not already doing so.

2. Positive team spirit

It's uncanny how many successful business owners tell me word for word "my staff are my biggest asset" where an unsuccessful business owner will mutter words along the lines of "the staff and turnover of staff are the biggest headache in my business".

3. View the big picture

A successful business owner will tend to work 'on their business' instead of 'in their business', operating with a birds eye view approach allows them to continue to grow whilst tracking the performance of their business in real time. This gives them the ability to make quick adjustments when required. Unsuccessful business owners tend to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to growth and finances in their business, they focus on the day to day running of their SME and don't often find how their business has performed until the end of the financial year.

4. Rollercoaster resilience

Business ownership is often a rollercoaster of emotions where no two days are the same, the most successful business owners are very resilient, they have the ability to bounce back after facing challenging times, and get back on the horse quickly.

5. Setting a good example

Culture is king when achieving great things within a business but culture trickles down from the top. The most successful business owners set an example to their team, they tend to be very humble, hard working and have a high EQ (emotional intelligence). It is always going to be an uphill battle expecting the very best out of employees when the owner is clocking into work at 10am and home at 2pm.

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