A great quote from Giorgio Armani over at Young Entrepreneur:
Remain true to yourself and your philosophy. Changing in the face of adversity will in fact diminish your credibility with your customers.
When I think about that, I remember the numerious entrepreneurs that I’ve known, many who start off in network marketing, MLM type businsesses. They go at it for a while and then when adversity faces them — such as three months past due and staring down the eviction path, they jump ship.
Now I’m not advocating that you stick with a sinking ship. But at the same time, people jump from product-to-product, venture-to-venture, so quickly and frequently that they loose credibility with their business partners. I can think of a networking group I belonged to a while back, and this wonderful lady changed her profession three times within a period of one year. Do you think I have any faith in her ability as a business person. Would I send clients her way? How would I or anyone be certain that she would be around to continue to service my company?
Now, through my businesses, we have continued to work on the cutting edge of professional services, yet always staying within our core compentancy, as well as continuing to strongly serve our existing clients – and never dropping a service — rather we keep expanding and plussing our service; again, all within the very narrow relam of our core compentancy.
I made a new network connection yesterday with a sales agent at a housing development who was thinking about starting his own business. He had tried before but it failed quickly. As a result, he ended up among the class of working employees instead of Entrepreneur! One of the biggest keys I shared with him is the elementary concept of a business plan. It is amazing how many people know that they should have a business plan, yet neglect to make one. The value I find in it, is that when the going gets rough, and things come up which makes business difficult, either by mistakes or other events such as customer lawsuits or tax issues or whatever, you can always fall back on your business plan as an established baseline. It is the foundation that a business is built on top of, which is not subject to the emotions and feelings of the moment.
