I hope you have all been enjoying the series “Building a Business that Counts.” I have enjoyed reading and commenting on your comments so far and hope that the rest of this series can be blessing to you.

Today, I want to get down to brass tacks. I want to share with you what I think are the essentials of business success. Those basic things that every entrepreneur and small business needs to understand in order to make their definition of success come to pass.

In his best selling book The E-Myth Revisited (Amazon affiliate link) Michael Gerber speaks about the “fatal assumption” in business. He says that the fatal assumption is, “if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand the business that does that technical work.” In other words, you may be an awesome carpenter, but that does not mean that you understand how to run a successful and profitable carpentry business.

In order to make your business grow and thrive, you need to understand the essentials of business success. I think that these essentials fall into five categories:

1. The entrepreneurial mindset. This mindset allows the business owner to always be open to evaluate the potential success of every opportunity placed before their business. It is the creative side of the business where risk and rewards are calculated.

2. Business financial education. While budgeting, profit margins, pricing, overhead, fixed expenses and the like might well be a foreign language to most entrepreneurs and small business owners, understanding how they work in your business is essential to long-term business success. Don’t loose sight of the money. Nothing else in your definition of success will come true if you don’t keep the money under control!

3. Basic marketing education. Peter Drucker once said, “Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.” Both require a creative mind and the willingness to take risks. Unless your business has a marketing plan and the will to engage the market, chances of success are minimal.

4. Leadership education. Even the most “solo” of solo-entrepreneurs needs to have leadership skills. Learning how to direct your clients/customers into making a decision is absolutely necessary in developing a successful business. If and when employees come into the picture, these skills need to be sharpened regularly to keep the company moving smoothly and in the right direction at all times.

5 Personal growth education. This is probably one of the least considered of the essentials of business success. Most business owners don’t see either the value of personal growth training nor to they make ample time for it in their business. Yet, if you study the lives of some of the greatest business owners in history, they found such education as essential for themselves and their businesses.

Understanding and putting to practice these essentials does not guarantee business success, but they do make the probability of that success greater. To discard them makes failure your primary option.

What do you think about this list? Are there other essentials that you would include?