Raise the bar on earnings potential

What business personality are you? Money hungry or driven to better the lives of others?

Let’s have an honest one-to-one conversation here: how many of you have becoming a multimillionaire as one of your business goals?

There are two types of business personalities. The first are driven by their desire to help customers better their lives and making six-figure profits is not top of their priority list. They use money to improve their products, while the second type cannot help but think about how to turn that simple business idea into millions of dollars. And they will keep selling that specific thing or concept because it makes money and not necessarily because they are driven to change people’s lives.

Money was never a priority for me until a friend changed my perspective. She is a business owner, running a number of ventures around the country. Discussing business profits became the norm whenever we went out for lunch or dinner. She loved what she did because money drove her. Becoming a billionaire is her lifetime goal. And although it was not mine, she still insisted I change my stance on money.

So how did she do it? Well, she taught me how changing a few management aspects of my business would help me generate a higher income, which would then help me manifest the rest of my dreams. I was the first type of business personality – the one looking to better the lives of others. But I could only make that happen if I had the cash flow to support that. I needed to merge my desire to help others with the desire to make money.

So let’s say becoming rich is one of the main aims of your game. How could you do things differently as an entrepreneur to increase your chances of making that happen? Well maybe by incorporating more of business personality type one, you might succeed faster. Here are some tips:

• Start by helping others. The most successful business people I know have the support of the many people they helped. They make time to understand their customers, provide them with guidance and advice, and push their team members to excel. They realise that their success is the success of those around them, and when they reach the top they want their team and customers to be up there with them.

• Stop focusing on money and instead focus on reaching more customers. Let's say you started an ice-cream business and you only have 30 regular customers. If your goal is to make more money, then you would focus on multiple ways to extract more cash from that pool of 30. But if you dedicated that energy to expanding your customer reach, you would score other benefits as well: you reach more people – who might supply feedback on how to improve your products – and, in turn, increase your profits. Your new reach could help you open doors you did not dream of opening on your own, or point you to a new direction entirely.

• Focus on the one thing you do better than anyone else. If I had to choose one valuable lesson that my mentor has taught me, that would be it. I should completely focus on that aspect and improve on it especially if I am passionate about it. So be hard on yourself to perfect your skill. Take a look at successful business people out there such as the likes of Bill Gates, and you will see they have at least one skill they are better at than anyone else. So why not find out how the top people in your field became successful. If you want to be the next mobile app designer, for example, check out the up-and-coming apps out there; what did the designers do differently? Sometimes reading about their journeys could inspire something in yours.

• Last but not least measure your goals to see how you are progressing. If you aim to attract 200 customers throughout the year, set out steps to achieve that, and measure your success, whether on a weekly or monthly basis. That should keep you on track, and see where you slacked off.

When it comes to turning a profit, we sometimes have to channel our focus to different aspects of our business. Once we do that, the profits will find their way to us.

Manar Al Hinai is an award-winning Emirati writer and communications consultant based in Abu Dhabi. Twitter: @manar_alhinai.

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