Being Proactive in you Home Based Business

One of the successful traits of a home based business is being proactive. Being proactive means you are anticipating a situation and will take charge of that situation. In a home based business, you cannot just sit back and assume business or income will come your way. You want to act in advance (be proactive) to deal with an expected difficulty. Just because you started this 'great' home based business, does not mean that you will have an easy time building that business. You need to learn to be proactive in order to grow and develop your business.

In Marsha Petrie Sue's recent book, "The Reactor Factor", she states that difficult situations will always arise. The measure of success is how you deal with each particular situation. She summarizes the actions you can take as "Take it, Leave it, or Change it". Depending on your history, you may choose not be proactive in dealing with the problem and you may choose to either ignore it ("Take it" - keep the status quo) or walk away from the situation ("Leave it"). These can be valid solutions depending on what is currently going on in your business but are based more on reactions and reactive behavior instead of proactive behavior. What you do not want to do in your business is to become reactive to problems.

Reacting to either a positive or negative business situation is not going to help you to grow your home based business. You will always feel like you are behind and that the problems are leading you around instead of you taking charge of the problems (anticipating problems) and determining solutions in advance of the problems. Being proactive, would be equivalent to Marsha's version of "Change it". You can see what may happen and make decisions based on anticipated desires and results. How many people have you dealt with that continually tell you that life is unfair and bad things happen to them? How many times did they admit that they had anticipated the problem, but choose to do nothing about it? Don't they claim that "life happened?" By being proactive, you are essentially taking control of your destiny, you are anticipating a problem or situation and then choosing to make adjustments prior to the actual situation occurring.

The reactive people are the types of people that will bring both you and your business down. Bad things happen to everyone, it is how you react or choose to act with the bad things that will differentiate you. You may be able to see a problem starting to form on the horizon of your business. At that point, if you choose to be proactive, you would essentially go out to meet the problem with a solution of your choosing instead of waiting for the problem to become full-blown and then having to deal with the ramifications in a reactionary mode. Basically, being proactive requires that you as a business person take the initiative. You want to act and not be acted upon.

Just because you are proactive, it does not give you license to be pushy or bossy. It means that you are anticipating a situation and are making moves to correct or solve the situation before it becomes damaging to your home based business. You cannot change how the current economic crisis is hurting some people around you, but you can change how you do business so that the same economic situation does not damage your business.

In order to stay focused and proactive, you will need to decide what you can and cannot change. In the example I cited above, you cannot change the current economic situation, but you can change how your business manages money and generates sales. You can control how your business succeeds in the economic downturn, but you cannot control the downturn. You need to focus on what you can change, and leave the rest alone. I am not suggesting that you ignore anything that you cannot change, but that you do not waste your valuable resources trying to change that which you cannot. You want to spend your time working on the things you can do something about. Reactive people end up trying to change the things that cannot be changed, and as a result, they feel frustrated and defeated.

Until tomorrow...