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It pretty much goes without saying that you want your business to succeed, right? Of course. That’s a completely ridiculous question. Every single budding entrepreneur wants their business to succeed. Otherwise, what’s the point? To help ensure that your business is successful, you’ve probably read a great deal about the things that your business needs and how to improve it. And that’s great, that’s one of the best things that you can do. The internet is filled with fantastic advice on how to make sure that you are running the best possible business. But sometimes the kind of advice you read about running a business gets so bogged down in the minutiae that it ends up missing some incredibly important points. A lot of the time this is simply because people assume that these points are so obvious they don’t even need mentioning. But businesses do miss them. A lot of startups fail because they are so focussed on the little details that they forget about the broad strokes. So here are three ways to improve your business that are so blindingly obvious, there’s a good chance you might have missed them entirely.

Always shop around

Your business is going to require equipment; that’s true not matter what it is. And that equipment is going to be an investment. If you’re a small business, you really can’t afford to spend huge amounts of money on equipment. So what do you do? You shop around. Find the best possible deals, haggle with manufacturers and distributors. If you’re running a medical practice then why not look for discounted medical supplies. A lot of the time these things will still be high quality, you’ve just got to be smart with where you look.

Hire the right people

There’s a tendency with small businesses to offer jobs to people that the business owner is close to personally. Now this can be a fantastic thing to do. It gives people a chance they might not otherwise have had and it gives you the opportunity to mold someone into the kind of employee that you want. But you should always make sure that whoever you’re hiring is right for your company. Find out their strengths and weaknesses, what they’re passionate about and what their goals are. For a small company, hiring the wrong employees can be a seriously risky prospect with far-reaching consequences.

Learn to leave work alone

The issue with a startup is that it’s often very hard to separate your personal life from your professional life. This might not seem like a big deal at first, but it can become a serious problem. Without a decent work-life balance, your work ends up eating up most of your free time, and you come to resent your company for the way that it’s taking over. It can have an impact on your personal relationships as well as the quality of the work that you’re doing. One of the most important things that almost every business owner forgets is that, sometimes, it’s important just to put your business down and walk away.