Most people say that just be determined to have a business and it shall be yours. Is it that simple?

The most touted book that nearly everyone has read — ‘The Secret’ — tells you to declare that you have it, believe that you have it and to behave like you have it. Will this role-play help you to build, grow and sustain your business?

Let’s take a closer look into the nitty-gritty of following the whiff of your determination and see what are the other ingredients involved in the perfect business pie.

Ability

First of all check yourself out. Are you the creative kind, the financial type, or the peoples’ person? If the former, please find a partner you can trust who can control finances and costs, as that is not your strong point and you cannot build a profitable business without that.

Are you the financial type? Please get a partner with a risk-taking appetite or your calculative nature will never let you jump into riskier ventures that could turn out to be really profitable. If you are a peoples’ person, you need to curb being over-friendly as that will leave you open to people taking undue advantage, which will not help you in charging for services and will make you give them away as favours.

To be an entrepreneur, you need to be able to have a bright idea, financial acumen and be stern enough with your potential clients. Of course, there is an edgy balance here of various factors that cannot be ignored and is in fact a natural ability some are just born with.

So if you feel you lack any of the above, please do not go out there and put your life on a tether and struggle without the ability that is necessary.

Credibility

Next comes credibility. I remember when I started the agency I was asked for my credibility without which it was very difficult to get the first contract. It was a chicken-and-egg story.

How do you build credibility if you don’t get the first worthy job to prove it? This is an obstacle course that you need to cross where there are many landmines as you might have bad publicity for jobs not perfectly done and few outstanding reports for excellent jobs.

It is how you leverage your company forward with the good jobs done through building the right portfolio and letting potential clients know who you are. Even after so many years, many of my known clients still surprise me by saying — ‘Oh! I did not know you did this service as well’.

This means it is very important to not assume that all your clients or potentials know what you do.

It is imperative to send emails from time to time in indirect ways at festival times or special days and remind your target of all that you do. Today social media marketing has become a very valuable tool to broadcast your special services through pictures, write-ups, etc.

If used wisely the effects spread. After a while all your marketing will be on autopilot through references. You have to make it easy for potential clients to meet you by making sure all your contact details are everywhere and that all your marketing collateral — even if it is your email signature — speak your brand story in a nutshell.

Stability

Most of us get enveloped in a sea of ideas and thoughts all concentrated in the same direction. We get flooded in our passion for a certain line of business and carry on that road thinking that we are masters at that trade. We avoid various other ancillary lines of business that might complement our business and actually make each unit work better by feeding it from within.

For example, an interior design unit could invest in a joinery workshop and then even get into a small division that actually sources out different kinds of wood or finishes, thus providing stability in a market where suddenly no one wants to pay much for designing, but wants you to include your designing costs in the execution, especially in project-based billings.

Stability is the art of diversifying within your universe. Build more pillars that hold up the entire roof of profitability. Don’t go so far out in expansions that the businesses do not connect to each other and it would be a Herculean task to monitor them as they would be so unrelated.

I am not saying it cannot succeed... it can, but for that you need to have a specialist partner you can trust who would be the driving factor of that business. It is not possible to be a super-person who can handle two completely unrelated lines of businesses and do justice to both.

Sustainability

Global markets are all about volatility. There are the Middle East tensions to think about, there is the bubble theory, there is corruption in developing nations curbing progress, the devaluation dangers, etc. How do you build a sustainable business that will weather any heavy storm?

When the real estate sector collapsed, the companies that survived were companies that had industrial or retail clients. Of course, brand companies that serviced the real estate sector made some serious big bucks but most of them vanished or downsized.

The market was flooded with very high-end skilled professionals who had lost their jobs due to the real estate downturn. Many of them became first-time entrepreneurs who learnt from what they saw and built businesses targeting a variety of industries and not just the ones in the upturn.

Flexibility

Lastly, you need to check how flexible you are in your outlook and dealings with clients. Today the maximum flexibility you see is in the printed publications, as most of the clients are going digital.

At this point, joint ventures become inevitable. Not every company can invest in building a digital arm to support its marketing and you see the rise of very big digital companies offering complete outsourcing services and providing the missing ingredient to print publications in expanding their offerings.

Joint ventures give your business the flexibility to take away the limits to what you can offer to a client in terms of a full solution in brand management. As a brand cannot be managed by traditional tools, you have to make sure you are equipped or have the right connections globally to make it competitively economical to offer the right mix of services.

There was a time when many agencies said they would only work on retainers and not on lone projects. The market today demands performance from even the big guys.

A company has to be flexible enough to take on the challenge in the proving phase and then can look towards long-term contracts. This forces companies to be on edge to keep improving themselves and constantly invest in new talents to keep up.

— The writer is Managing Director of BuyDoBuy Advertising and Diplomats Summit Ltd., UK.