How to be a leader in the industry, even as a small business

As a small business owner, one of the most important traits that you need is to be able to posses is the ability to compete in your industry.Even though you may be a small business of one, you are never alone when it comes to competing in the market place.You can be a leader in your industry no matter what the size of your business, as long as you have or are willing to develop the necessary traits.

To be a leader in any industry as a small business owner it is essential to have the motivation needed to get your business going in the right direction.Being a leader in your industry requires a great deal of energy.You will need to work long hours and maybe even travel for days or weeks at a time in order to gain a competitive advantage.Through all of the growth that you will experience, there will come a great challenge to remain focused and alert.Another important trait that you must either be gifted with or work hard to obtain is good business intuition.Chances are that if you are really good at what you do, you are also in tuned to the needs of your business.Intuition is what allows savvy business owners to gain a competitive advantage without needing to know everything there is to know about your industry.When you have intuitiveness, you have a huge competitive advantage in the industry because you can compete with experience and education without having to have put the investments of time and money into these two attributes.When you can use your intuition to make important business decisions you also save time in the long run because you do not have to look up information or research a decision, you just use your gut feeling.You earn the advantage of jumping on opportunities as they are presented.

Being an industry leader as a small business owner takes a lot of maturity and team oriented thinking.Any successful leader will tell you that you must be a team player in order to be a good leader.A leader is not a leader unless the people that they lead respect them for their fostering of team cohesiveness.Being a leader in the industry is not about dominance.To be a good leader, personal power and recognition must be secondary to the development of your employees (or your business if you are the sole employee). The maturity of a small business leaser is based on recognizing that more can be accomplished by empowering and delegating others than can be by ruling, ordering, or micro-managing others.

Emotional intelligence is a crucial factor in business that can really mean the difference between closing a deal and maintaining a relationship or losing your customers to the competition.Emotional intelligence is measured by your ability to be sensitive and empathetic to the feelings of others.Those who are emotionally intelligent realize just how contradictive the phrase, "it's not personal, it's just business," is.With small business owners, business is always personal.Your heart and soul is put into your business and potential customers are going to have their emotions as a factor at the point of purchase.

Leaders are rarely born, so there is plenty of opportunity for all to become industry leaders.If you are passionate about what you do and have the charisma and energy to follow through with your ideals, you can not only empower yourself to reach your goals, but you can also be the driving force behind a team of individual's whose goals are aligned with yours.Using your vision of what your business can become, you can lead and captivate employees and customers alike.