You have just passed a huge milestone in your business. What do you do next?

Don’t rest yet! There is still plenty for you to do. However, remember that there are also plenty of things NOT to do.

1. DON’T Try to Avoid Future Failure

Failure is an essential preamble to success. Chances are, you probably have experienced many failures before attaining this most recent success.

If you want to enjoy future success, don’t start avoiding failure. Continue to embrace it and seek to learn from setbacks whenever possible.

Failure is an important step in the process of trial and error. Thus, don’t avoid failure as it will only bring about more inaction.

2. DON’T Think You are Immune to Failure or Making Mistakes

On the flip side, don’t allow yourself to think that you are immune to failure, either.

Experiencing success does not equal continuing success. You are still vulnerable to failure, so while you shouldn’t avoid failure, you also shouldn’t take unnecessary risks or continue pursuing a project that is clearly unprofitable.

3. DON’T Stop Making Future Goals

Just because you have accomplished this goal doesn’t mean you can start to take it easy.

If you want to continue to enjoy success, you need to keep setting ambitious goals and consistently stretch yourself even further.

Allowing too much time between goal setting will bring about complacency. You’ll also overestimate your strengths, underestimate your weaknesses and forsake continued growth.

Your newest success should motivate you to reach even higher. You have found a technique that works–this is a great indicator for you to keep moving forward, not stopping.

4. DON’T Let a Success go by Unrewarded

Just because you shouldn’t stop setting goals doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your recent achievements.

Giving yourself and your staff a reward for an achievement will tie success with a good experience. This is important because it will allow you to look forward to the next success, since you know a reward is coming.

5. DON’T Ignore the Failures You’ve Made

Remember, failures are excellent opportunities to learn. Make sure that after experiencing a success, you reflect on the failures you have made so you know what mistakes can be avoided in the future.

Neglecting previous failures will make your next success that much more difficult to accomplish and will make you dramatically less competitive.

6. DON’T Ignore Successes

While you should identify what you have done wrong during your road to success, you should also identify what you have done correctly. This is extremely important since you will want to know what steps you took that helped contribute to your success in a positive way.

Being able to identify these steps will allow you to emulate these best practices again, so future success comes quicker.

Are there any other things you absolutely SHOULDN’T do after experiencing success?

Yes, yes. This is a rhetorical question. Of course trust is important in business!

With widespread uncertainty and distrust in the economy today, it is even more important that your company remains trustworthy.

However, if you hope to appear trustworthy to everyone, it is important that you actually are trustworthy to everyone. This includes your customers, suppliers, employees…even your competitors.

If you still don’t believe me that being trustworthy is important, here are some benefits to ensuring that all of your business dealings revolve around trust.

You’ll have a solid brand reputation

Customers would rather do business with a trustworthy brand than an untrustworthy one. Why? Customers know they have a higher chance of satisfaction with a dependable brand. They also know there is less of a chance they will regret their purchase decision.

Establishing your company as trustworthy will attract customers to you,
help them feel more comfortable with making purchase decisions as well as referring you to others.

Customer loyalty will increase

Not only does trustworthiness attract new customers, it also encourages repeat buys. If the overall buying experience was good, customers will want to return to you.

Since a relationship is based on trust, establishing this dependability can foster long-lasting relationships with your customers, who will be more apt to make bigger purchases in the future.

Suppliers will help you through difficult times

Being trustworthy does not stop with your customers. You should build this relationship with ALL stakeholders of your business, including your employees and suppliers.

Building trust with your suppliers will make them more willing to work with you through difficult times. Suppliers will work harder to improve their service to you and will even give you more leeway if a payment is late.

Competitors will respect you

Being a respected competitor is very important. While you wouldn’t want your competitors taking badly about you, you shouldn’t talk badly about your competitors either.

There is a very important reason to garner respect from your competition: they may be future business partners. Thus, maintaining trust will ensure you don’t spoil the possibility of a future joint venture.

You will have a better workplace culture

Having a unique and appealing workplace culture will have little effect if there is no trust in your organization. It will feel phony and hollow and will not catch on for long.

The only way a unique and empowering culture will stick is if there is trust present in the work environment.

Management will be more trustworthy

You want all of your managers to fully espouse your culture, as well as the company vision, mission, values and goals. Most importantly, your managers must be the most trustworthy out of all your staff.

You wont have employees very long if they don’t feel they can trust their superiors. Even those employees you don’t lose will seriously lack motivation.

Having trustworthy managers will allow you to keep a consistent workplace culture, and allow your vision, mission values and goals to be embraced at all levels of the organization.

Improved staff rapport

Trust keeps the lines of communication open. This means that your staff will have an easier time talking to one another, thus fostering stronger relationships.

Should a conflict arise, an atmosphere of trust will make conflicts between staff members easier to resolve, since communication will be easier.

Greater creativity

If your staff has trust in one another, they will feel more comfortable sharing ideas without fear of credit being taken.

This not only fosters openness, but will allow a free-flowing exchange of ideas, increasing the likelihood of innovation. This also provides a climate for better teamwork among staff.

You’ll be a fiercer competitor

These days, trust is VERY rare in the marketplace.

Being the trustworthy competitor means your untrustworthy competition will have to work much harder to attract and retain customers.

Customers are desperate for a company they can trust. Being trustworthy will attract life-long relationships that your untrustworthy competitors just wont find.

Are there any other benefits to being trustworthy as a business? What are some of the costs?

Do you offer a service heavily reliant upon your relationship with your clients?

Are you having difficulty growing without needing to dedicate more of your own time?

Pretend you have an accounting or medical practice. For the most part, your clients do business with you because they trust you as a professional, and your business generally grows because of your relationship with your clients.

In fact, in these types of businesses, where expertise and relationships are the Unique Selling Propositions, clients can be easily lost if they establish a relationship with one of your employees who leaves your practice.

This is a problem, as these types of businesses are quite unscalable–where you can’t grow without permanently putting in more hours and face-time.

So what to do? How do you change a business model such as this to make it scalable? How do you grow your business in such a way where your time wouldn’t grow with it? Below are some tips on how you can accomplish this.

“Productize” your service

It is rare that at item is 100% a good or 100% a service. It is usually a mixture of both.

For example, you purchase cough syrup at your local drug store. While it may not sound like you are purchasing a service, consider the cashier bagging the merchandise for you, taking your credit card, and even the store stocking the cough syrup in the most convenient place.

The same is true with services: there is always a product element of a service. Consider an accounting practice. One service that an accountant performs for a business is preparing the financial statements. The service is the preparation, but the actual good provided is the financial statement itself.

Using these examples, try to target the part of your service that is most like a product and use that as a basis for scaling.

For example, a web designer offers the service of designing a site. The product they offer is a finished site. You can “productize” this service by designing web site templates and either selling these templates or working off of these templates when putting together a site.

If you choose to work off of the templates, the service of designing is de-emphasized while the product (in this case, a more manufactured service) is emphasized. You may not be able to charge the same amount as you would for a custom web design, but this service is completely scalable.

Make it uniform

If you want a service that is scalable, it must be uniform. Uniformity means something is easily repeated and duplicated.

You want your service to be something that is repeatable so the customer encounters the same outstanding service every time. Uniformity will make the service seem more reliable and thus more attractive to the customer.

Something that is uniform will not require you personally to service the client since you are turning the service into something routine.

Make it basic

The more simple your service is, the easier it can be repeated and duplicated.

Chances are that if the service is simpler, there will be less skill required to perform the service. It will also be easier to train employees.

If making a service more basic is difficult, consider dividing the service into its fundamental parts. Then, delegate these more simple parts according to the position and skill sets of your employees.

Make it technical

Making a service technical will make it easier to automate, outsource or delegate.

Something that requires creativity or judgement will require experience and talent. This is difficult to repeat and scale, so make these types of services more technical by turning creative or judgement elements into systems if you can.

Scale a service that requires a lower level of expertise than your own

If you have ever been to a dentists office, you’ll notice that usually a dental hygienist performs a lot of the routine work on patients.

Why is this? Because dentists are trying to make their business more scalable–they want to grow their business and their clientele without over-stretching their time.

They have dental hygienists perform this routine work because they know their level of expertise is well equipped to handle this kind of work.

They delegate certain work where appropriate, where their own level of experience is not necessarily needed until the very end where they check everything over.

Learn from this practice. Try to scale a service that can be delegated to someone with less experience than you, but can still perform the service without any problem.

This routine work is a great example of a scalable service. Certain personal touches and experience is removed and uniformity and technical skill is added.

The customer still has trust that the routine work is being performed well, but the more experienced dentist does not need to perform the work themself.

The overall customer experience must be outstanding

If you ensure that all of your staff is dedicated to outstanding customer service, your client will feel more loyal and trust to your overall business. They will want to stick with your business because you have established an image of reliability and great service.

Ensure that your customers cannot be stolen by departing employees

This is a big problem with service and professional businesses. You don’t want the risk of losing a client to an employee who leaves your organization.

In order for a business to be scalable without these kind of risks, your customers must feel loyal to your business and they must find value in what your business provides.

If they feel that your overall service is outstanding and unique, their loyalty will lie with your business before any single employee.

Take, for example, financial representatives at bank branches. You may have established a relationship with a specific rep at your local branch because of their expertise and good customer service.

However, chances are your loyalty to your bank is due to good products and outstanding overall customer service. If the bank rep were to leave tomorrow, you probably wouldn’t follow him or or to the bank they leave to.

This is because the customer has an established loyalty to the BUSINESS and finds value in the overall customer service the entire BUSINESS provides.

Thus you must ensure that your service is designed in such a way that your clients enjoy working with your individual employees, but they know the service they get will be uniform with whichever employee they work with.

Make it transportable

If the work can be done remotely (e.g. not performed face-to-face), it can be completed by anyone (or anything) qualified for the work. This means you can outsource the work or even automate it if possible.

If outsourced, you can have the work sent directly to your customer. All you have to do is relationship servicing to ensure your clients are happy with the service.

One benefit to this is that you can eliminate management costs as well as salary and benefits expenses.

Another benefit is that making a service transportable means it is much easier to make the service uniform. The customer will encounter the same level of customer service and service quality every time and both your time and the customer’s time is saved.

Automate as much as possible

Automation is almost always better than delegating or outsourcing. If your service is uniform and transportable enough where it can be automated, you have even greater profit margin and scaling potential.

Look for the opportunity to automate any part of the service if possible.

Step aside

Now that you have structures and systems in place to ensure that your service offered is scalable, step back to ensure that it can grow without you.

Allow others to manage the day to day affairs of the scalable services you offer, this way you won’t be tied down to managing more and more as the service grows.

Create a product based on your expertise

Why don’t you capitalize on the knowledge you have acquired in your industry? In addition to offering services, why not sell an actual good that is a product of your knowledge?

A perfect example of someone who has done this is Dr. Oz, who is frequently featured on Oprah. Dr. Oz has gained a lot of publicity (and money) over his “You” books.

Dr. Oz capitalized on his knowledge of the human body and health in a very unique way. His approach to bringing value to the customer is the perfect example of how he utilized his knowledge to create a scalable business. He knew that his knowledge would be best scaled by putting it in print, not offering medical services.

This can be done instead of offering a service, or in tandem with your scalable service. It can also be used to market your service-side business.

Market your service through a product

Should you decide to both establish a scalable service and sell a product based on your expertise, you can use these two together to market one another.

Your product can market your scalable service and your service can market your product. The two together can act as an excellent marketing combination to expand your business without demanding more of your time.

Are there any other ways you can scale a service business?

The failure of these companies has created quite unprecedented conditions in the financial markets. There are a lot of buzzwords that we have been hearing as to why these companies have failed: debt, risk, sub-prime, greed and many, many others. But there is one key reason for this entire mess and it presents a valuable lesson for all of us entrepreneurs, managers and investors alike as to what to do and what not to do.

What is the true reason for this crisis? Its very simple: these businesses all had a short-term outlook. Allow me to explain: CEOs are under a tremendous amount of pressure from shareholders to generate stellar returns as quickly as possible. The board of directors, acting on behalf of the shareholders want a return and they want one now. They view returns on a quarterly basis, NOT a yearly basis. If there is a similar company generating even larger returns than this company, this company’s CEO is seen as doing a poor job. He/she will need to amend the company’s portfolio of assets to make sure that this company delivers like (or greater) returns. Otherwise, the CEO is fired.

But there are other incentives for CEOs to have a short-term outlook. CEOs typically don’t last very long at a company anyway. They may last a few years, then, because their company hits a rough patch, they are fired with a very generous severance package. Rumor has it that WaMu’s 3-week-old CEO is already getting a $13 million golden parachute. It pays for CEOs to take risks and get fired, further demonstrating the backwards point of view that a lot of these failing, publicly traded companies have on the importance of short-term gains. They get paid nicely, but it hurts everyone else, especially the shareholders (the owners of the company).

Thus, instead of investing in future, long term growth opportunities, these companies sacrificed this by looking for short-term gains in investing in extremely risky assets and making extremely risky investment decisions. It doesn’t take someone with a graduates degree in finance or economics to know beforehand how risky these practices were and that they would eventually result in a loss. But these companies did this anyway because the leadership has an incentive to have a short-term time horizon for their returns.

The moral of the story? Some risk is necessary, even good. Too much risk is obviously dangerous, but most importantly, your business’ success and growth depends on you having a long-term mindset. Looking for short-term growth will only cause you to forsake investing in long-term success and your company (and your wallet) will suffer because of it. Some immediate-term outlook is important, but it is vital that you strike a balance between short, medium and long-term goals. Use these companies’ failures as a lesson that taking risks for short term profits is, by definition, being near-sighted and can significantly limit your business’ ability to succeed and grow.

There is a second moral of this story for business owners looking to step aside and hire professional managers to take their place: hire those who value an appropriate balance of short, mid and long-term growth, and make sure you incent them to pursue this balance appropriately.