If you want to have a successful business, you really do need to put your customers’ needs first. While the guy next door may be able to offer lower prices, more features, and a more convenient location, there is one area where you can always best the competition. Customer service. More specifically, it is of utmost importance that you are easily accessible by both your current and potential customers.

For some brick and mortar stores, the only way to get in contact with the business is over the phone, and even then, it is only during regular business hours. You can do better than that! If you have a company website, it doesn’t take much to have a FAQ page set up, as well as a contact page where customers can ask you questions and inquire further about your products and services. When you receive an email message from a customer, you should respond as promptly as possible, even if you do not have a full answer. Simply acknowledge the receipt of the email and say that you will be following up in the next few days with more information.

Customers want to be acknowledged and they want to feel valued. Going beyond a simple phone number and an email address, you can also make yourself available through a company blog like this (responding to comments) or through something like a Twitter account. Be available, be valuable, and respond promptly.

Happy Canada Day, everyone! It’s today that many of us will be going outside, enjoying the sunshine, eating some cotton candy, and maybe watching a few fireworks in the evening as well. It’s a day that most Canadians choose not to go to work and many businesses may be closed today, including everyone from dentists to diners. But is that the best idea for your company?

Business owners and employees alike have the right to a day off from time to time. Working every day for long hours can’t possibly be good for your health, even if it assists in improving your bottom line. Your health is ultimately much more important than that. Statutory holidays, like Canada Day, provide the perfect excuse to throw up the “Closed” sign and relax with a backyard barbecue.

At the same time, depending on the nature of your business, it may be very profitable to be open on this day. If you happen to run a restaurant, a coffee shop, or a convenience store near a local beach or other popular location, today could prove to be one of the lucrative days of the year. Think about all the people heading out to the parks and how many of them will be dying for an ice cold beverage or a quick snack on the go.

For certain customer service businesses and those that operate internationally, closing today may not be an option. If you have a good number of clients who are based in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere in the world, it may be important that you are available to them — via phone, email, live online chat, etc. — in case they need you for some dire emergency.

By choosing to close today, you may be foregoing a good amount of revenue. At the same time, this extra revenue can easily be absorbed by the premium hourly rates you will need to pay your employees, as well as the sacrifice of some good old R&R for yourself. In the end, the choice is yours.

Starting and running a business can be a very complicated process. There are just so many things that you have to take into consideration and when the bills start piling up, you may feel inclined to make a few quick bucks to alleviate that burden. I can understand the desire to do so, but it is in your best interest to keep true to your vision throughout the process.

You may come across an opportunity where you may be able to over-charge or possibly deceive a potential customer. Greed being what it is, you may feel inclined to take advantage of this opportunity. This is the kind of scenario that pops up with hosts that lie. DON’T FALL INTO THIS TRAP!

Honesty is oftentimes the best policy. In the short term, lies and underhanded tactics may be able to land an extra sale or two, but these indiscretions can come back with a vengeance and ultimately hurt you in the long run. It is important that you keep your long term goals and long term business plan in mind when you are making any business decisions. Be strategic, be crafty, and be innovative, but never sacrifice your integrity in the process.

Only then can your business succeed in the long run.

It’s always exciting (and nerve-racking) when you start up a new venture. It’s even better when you open your doors for the first time and enjoy a huge flood of business. This means that you have a huge opportunity to make a lot of money and truly achieve a great level of entrepreneurial success. With that in mind, will you be able to handle a sustained level of growth? What will you do if your business suddenly doubles or triples in size?

This is the issue of scalability and it’s an issue that many business owners tend to overlook. For example, if you decide to start an online business where you sell widgets through eBay, business may be relatively slow in the beginning. As such, it isn’t much of a stretch for you to operate the business on your own, putting up the listings manually, processing payments manually, and shipping out the goods yourself.

As business starts to pick up, it will no longer be possible for you to handle all of these manual tasks yourself. What mechanisms do you have in place to manage this growth? Will you hire staff? Automate the process somehow?

Regardless of what kind of business you decide to start — web hosting, e-commerce, a coffee shop, etc. — one of the areas that you should give some serious thought is scalability. Will you be able to handle the growth that your business may experience? It’s a good problem to have, to be sure, but it’s still a problem.

Given the speed that information is exchanged these days, it seems like it’s almost more important to be the first one to do something rather than being the one who provides the best version of that something. The market is incredibly fickle and it seems that people have shorter attention spans than ever. If you’re not the first one to come out with a certain innovation or concept, you run the risk of being called a copycat.

For example, take a look at something like the Apple iPhone. Strictly speaking, it may not have been the first phone to feature a full-face touchscreen display, but it was probably one of the first to have this kind of functionality in the area of consumer-minded mobile phones. Up until then, the only real touchscreen phones were those that were catering to the corporate end of the market. These ranged from the Palm Treo to PocketPC devices. The iPhone, on the other hand, was multimedia-centric and catered to the regular user.

Since then, we’ve seen phones like the LG Vu and the HTC Touch, but these are all inevitably compared to the Apple iPhone. It’s hard to say whether these devices would have been more successful (and garnered more attention) if they had been announced or launched first. Speed, in every respect, is of great importance.

This concept translates to other areas as well. Ship your products quickly so that customers can enjoy them sooner. Respond to inquiries faster so that you don’t lose potential sales to competitors. The list goes on. Partly because of the blazing speed of the Internet, our society is very much about instant gratification. If you don’t do what you need to do now, you can easily become yesterday’s news.

Many first time business owners unsuspectingly fall into the exact same pitfall. They get all excited about starting their new venture, investing in all sorts of things that they hope will grow the business into a huge money-making machine. They buy advertising every chance that they get and they purchase only the best equipment and furnishings, assuming that they will want nothing short of the best for their business.

This assumption is a very slippery slope toward spending yourself into bankruptcy. Many business owners see these expenses as justified, because they are investments into the future and these expenses can be written off for income tax purposes. Nonetheless, this is still money being spent and it just furthers the negative cash flow experienced by many businesses in their infancy.

It is important to be careful with where you spend your money for your business. Treat the business account just like you would a personal account. There’s no reason to buy the most expensive laptop on the market “for business use” if it’s not something that you need, just as you probably wouldn’t buy the most expensive laptop on the market for personal purposes either. It’s still money being spent and you can be just as well-equipped to tackle the world with a middle-of-the-road notebook instead.

Don’t be a Scrooge — spend money where you need to — but don’t go on a shopping spree with the company credit card either. This is part of the reasons why so many businesses fail in the first six months.