Raj Malik is CEO & Co-Founder of KikScore, an exciting startup that helps small online businesses use their own track record of reliability and trustworthiness to increase sales and close more leads. Raj is a contributor to his company’s blog at blog.kikscore.com, a past speaker at SXSW and is passionate about helping small business and entrepreneurs succeed.

I have been on this journey of a small business owner that has a startup business now for a couple of years. There have been a lot of ups and downs, long days and nights, major challenges, successes and yet the path is still long. Now I could just fold up shop and give up saying its too hard or I want to do something else, but I honestly must say I love this journey. Along the way so far I have learned a lot of different things about myself, our business, about having partners and launching a brand new product into the market. I would like to share a few of my lessons learned that may help you on your business journey.

1) Maintain that Optimism – The road for small businesses or startups is paved with many roadblocks. The key is to keep your chin up and do not let those obstacles get you down. To that point, as a small businesses and startups is vital to stay optimistic otherwise as soon as pessimism and doubt sets in, failure is typically quickly around the corner. This optimism does need to be tempered and should not be unrealistic optimism. Rather it should be realistic optimism and that ”can do” attitude and approach to your day-to-day activities can make a difference. There have been days when I wake up and say wow I really don’t know if this particular partnership is going to work out with a company or why do these customers keep complaining about this one area of our product? It can get anyone down. I have found that refocusing and saying well there has to be a silver lining to these issues. Now we need to go find what the silver lining is. On the customer point, I say well our customers are clearing telling us something so lets go fix that issue so customers can be happy about their experience with our product. On the partner side, I say lets pick up the phone and call that partner so we can see what is going on in their head because there has to be a better way of doing this!

2) Launch As Early As Possible – As a small business and startup gets rolling, each of us inevitably engages in an internal discussion of when should we launch our business. I have run into so many people where they ask me when is the right time to launch a business? For every small business and startup the answer is a little different, but my recommendation is launch as early as you can. The CEO of LinkedIn, Reed Hoffman essentially says the same thing by saying “if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you launched too late.” There is also a factor of just jumping in the deep end of the pool and seeing if your business can swim. I am afraid I see so many people that keep waiting and waiting until the time is perfect. There is no perfect time to launch your business. The other key reason to launch your business and product early leads us to the next lesson learned.

3) Seek Out Customer Feedback & Give Them Tools to Give Your Business Feedback – We all launch businesses to serve a customer’s need. So when you launch your business and even throughout your business journey, it is critical to seek out feedback from your customers on your business, product and key areas of your business such as customer service. You can get feedback by asking your customers, but my recommendation is make it easy for your customers to give you that important feedback so you can improve your business. Therefore as a small business or a startup, it is critical that you provide easy to use tools to customers to give feedback. Give customers the right tools and you will get feedback. This is a post that describes some of the tools that are available for getting customer feedback. Now what do you do with the feedback once you get it? Take a step back and do not act on every individual piece of feedback because you will likely go off in a hundred different directions. Instead take the time to analyze the feedback, look for trends in the comments and then act on that feedback. It is this feedback that you get that is so important for your business, especially in the early stages just after you have launched!

4) Constantly Remain Focused on the Important Items that Move Your Business Forward – It amazes me how many directions a startup or small business owner is constantly being pulled. And they are never in the same direction. Whether it is trying to get partners, dealing with a new competitor, pitching for investor money, getting interviewed by a magazine, restructuring a current partnership, being asked to guest blog on a major industry website, addressing employee issues – all of these have a tendency to hit at the exact same time and create distractions. Did you notice I did not mention in that list anything about your customers? All of those items while very important take you away from your key priority for your business – serving customers and bringing in more customers! With so many distractions for your startup or your small business, it is often a challenge staying focused. I previously covered here 5 Steps to Cut Distractions and Focus More and here are additional tangible actions that your company can take to keep you and your team focused. A distracted business will be a failed business. As these two posts lay out, it is critical for the success of any business to maintain that laser focus on what is important. The more focused you can be in your business, the better the chances you have of succeeding.

5) Have the Right Team Around You– As your business launches and gets rolling, the team around you will make or break your success. The right players, in the right positions with the right game plan help increase the chances for startup and small business success. A weak team can mean doom for your business. Fight the urge to bring on underqualified candidates, family friends that you know will not work out or employees or partners that will give up when the times get tough. Also when you see weakness or someone not performing, instead of giving them repeated second chances or worse yet ignoring their underachievement, take swift action and make a change. Your business will be better off in the long run to rid yourself of people who are not performing. Also as you build your team look for a few important traits that I have seen tend to give an indication of success and that is 1) abundance of common sense; 2) resilience; 3) self-starter and 4) being proactive. The resilience and self-starting DNA in team members at a startup and small business is so important because you are constantly facing roadbocks and you’re continually understaffed. Resiliency gives employees the stomach to keep bouncing back and having self-starters really helps to have people go way above and beyond what is in their job responsibilities!

6) Surround Yourself with Leaders That Roll Up Your Sleeves – Expanding on having the right team, it is important to have team players in a startup or small business be proactive leaders who continually work to push your business forward in big ways! Leaders in small businesses and startups inevitably are forced to wear multiple hats, improvise when necessary, be creative and always be aggressive. The more people that you hire that fit this mold, the greater the chances of success that you will have. I have learned that in a startup small business every thing takes longer than expected and is harder to achieve. Often times it is more expensive too. So that is why it is important to create a mindset around your office that your employees need to lead by continually being creative, opportunistic and willing to dig in and do the hard work necessary to achieve victory for the business. Here is a two part series on this topic of small business and startup leadership discussing it in more detail here and here.