Every American has the right and opportunity to become a business owner. It’s a huge part of the American Dream and if you have the drive and desire to own a business and create income you can do it, too. It’s a dream that people from other parts of the world continue to risk life and limb to acquire.

The benefits of the franchise model are reduced risks to achieving that dream. Postal Connection offers a proven business model and systems in place to help franchisees become as successful as their dream requires.

Skills Needed to be a Good Business Owner
However, It helps to understand a few of the basic tenets of business when embarking on business ownership whether it be an independent business or a venture with an established franchise. While attaching yourself to a franchise can help, you still want know the basics of the following four areas:

Sales: Learning basic salesmanship is essential since sales is what makes any business run. This means knowing how to satisfy your customers, creating appealing offerings and knowing what people respond to in relation to what you offer.

Marketing: This is related to sales but it’s more about understanding where your customers and prospects come from and figuring out how to attract them to your business. A good franchise system can help enormously with this.

Accounting: Basic knowledge of your revenue streams (where they come from and how you can get more), your expenses (and how can you reduce them) and how revenue minus expenses equals profit which every business needs to survive.

Strategic Planning: Usually, when running a business, you find yourself planning 3 to 6 months ahead under an umbrella of a 1 to 5-year overarching strategy. You create these strategies and plans. You also have to be flexible in your thinking and know when to stick with, alter or even jettison a strategy/plan if it’s not working.

A strategy would be something like this: The goal is to increase revenue by 10% in 2016. A plan to achieve that might be that you will introduce high margin products into your mix of offering in 2016.

You don’t have to be an expert in each one of these areas but acquiring some basic knowledge of them will help your business run smoothly. Many community colleges offer useful workshops in these and other business disciplines.