Third Annual Small Business Report Reveals the Keys to Growing Like An Expert Entrepreneur
ASHLAND, Ore., June 11, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — For small business owners looking to grow, the key is to behave like an ‘expert entrepreneur.’ According to the 2014 State Of The Business Owner (SOBO) Report, announced today by business coaching leader EMyth, owners who follow a key set of traits learned by seasoned entrepreneurs are growing 60% faster than their peers. These traits include taking on a true growth mentality, knowing how to build a growth-oriented team, and following a single proven framework instead of taking a piecemeal approach. EMyth commissioned the State Of The Business Owner project, now in its third year, surveying more than 1,400 business owners to provide the SMB community with actionable insights to help them grow.
“This year, we decided to study exactly what behaviors expert entrepreneurs were doing relative to those who were less experienced,” said Jonathan Raymond, EMyth’s Chief Brand Officer. “There were a number of surprising findings, but none more so than that a second-time business owner is overwhelmingly more likely to succeed than a first-time owner, even if that first time owner has been in business for 30 years. The seasoned entrepreneurs were sustaining a five-year rate of growth over 3 times that of first-time owners. And, what’s more, it didn’t matter if they’d owned two, three, or even more businesses before. The magic factor was getting past the first one. So, we wanted to figure out exactly what they learned so first-time owners could radically increase their chances of success.”
The 2014 SOBO Report also isolated the most common and critical challenge entrepreneurs face: that their greatest strength can be their greatest liability. Cameron Madill, CEO of Pixelspoke, EMyth’s partner in the SOBO project, said “Business owners are by and large extremely passionate and committed people, but what’s interesting is that there’s a point – a very specific one – where that strength turns into a weakness, because that strength keeps them from building a truly growth-oriented team around them. It’s not surprising that the other key data point to emerge was that, overwhelmingly, owners said the best and the worst business decisions they made were about people – who they hired, who they fired, and why.”
Helping business owners make the right people decisions, and putting the critical systems in place to help them and the business grow is at the heart of EMyth’s coaching program. A leader in transformational business coaching for nearly 40 years, EMyth’s ‘people first, systems second’ approach has worked for countless entrepreneurs around the word and in every industry. The EMyth program balances personal growth with systems development, the key to creating a business that delivers results that are greater than the sum of its parts.
