In this week’s edition of Wash Wisdom, discover eight tips for achieving business success by getting out of your comfort zone and five ways to manage your business’ growth.

Ways to succeed

Featured on Forbes’ website, contributor Martin Zwilling offers some advice on solving problems outside your knowledgeable comfort zone in his article “How To Stretch Your Comfort Zone For Business Success.” According to Zwilling’s article, here eight tips:

• Be positive and independent. Don’t look at problems as roadblocks; look at them as challenges to overcome. Be confident and try to solve them yourself, rather than always depending on others.
• Make a list of goals. Documenting your business goals takes them out of the vague nebula on your mind and puts them into a concrete, physical form. If you can’t identify specific goals, your business may end up wandering aimlessly in the market.
• Prepare for your entrepreneurial journey. Before you even begin, gather all the resources you need as well a support team of knowledgeable and skilled people.
• Stop talking and start acting. You can talk about your plans for years, but you’ll never achieve anything if you don’t try and act on them. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes: Remember, be positive and think of them as the best of learning opportunities.
• Focus and prioritize. Don’t try to solve all your problems at once. Prioritize what you need to do and tackle each issue one at a time.
• Find a way to accurately measure progress. If you only have vague feelings about your successes or failures, you won’t know how best to proceed. Get a better understanding of your sales figures.
• Celebrate successes. Even the smallest success can bolster employee and team morale and loyalty, so be sure to celebrate when those times come.
• Business first, product second. Focus on growing your business off the original product; save product refinements and additional features for later, after creating more business.

Read the entire article here.

5 ways to manage a growing business

In the article “Managing new business growth — one day at a time” on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette’s website, contributor Matthew Gutierrez interviews growing businesses to get their take on growth management. According to Gutierrez’s article, here are some tips that other companies shared:

• Put your staff in order. Add a talent manager responsible for recruiting, training and managing employee issues, such as promotions and compensations. Make sure there are protocols in place so that when new hires ask about them, you have a ready answer.
• Change how you market your business. Look into websites, social media and blogs especially.
• Know when to put a hold on new business. If an opportunity or partnership isn’t working out, cut it.
• Merge new hires into the company. Don’t hire too many new employees at once and create an influx. Have a structured hiring process and make sure there is a support staff in each department to handle the new hires.
• Create and communicate the company culture. A company culture can be defined as a company’s values and standard of conduct. Communicate these values to your employees so that they align themselves with the business.

Find the article here.