Trust Your Intuition

By: Brian Tracy

The Essence of Business Success
The essence of a successful business is really quite simple. It is your ability to offer a product or service that people will pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs, ideally three or four or five times your cost, thereby giving you a profit that enables you to buy and to offer more products and services.

Add Value in Some Way
The key to a successful business is to add value by bringing the product or service from another place to where you're selling it, or by creating the product or service and selling it at a price higher than your total cost of production. You become wealthy by either selling a few products or services at high prices, or by selling many products or services at lower prices with smaller profits.

The Best Strategy of All
The best strategy, of course, is to aim to sell a larger volume with a smaller profit on each item. Most great fortunes in America have been made selling large quantities of products over a wide area, thereby broadening the market and reducing your dependency on just a few customers.

Go From the Known to the Unknown
Early in my business career, I learned another key rule for business success and it's simply this. Start off in an established field and only experiment with new products or services out of your profits from your established business.

Success Leaves Tracks: Follow Them
One reason many entrepreneurs fail is that they have grandiose ideas of being the first into the market with a brand new, untried, unproven product. Don't you fall into this trap. As you begin to magnetize your mind with visual images of wealth and success, as you begin looking everywhere for profitable ideas, you will begin to attract into your life the people and opportunities you need to achieve your goals. I've learned from long experience that you must learn to trust your intuition, your gut feeling concerning any business decision.

Flood Your Mind With Ideas
Read every publication, explore every opportunity. Remain open to all ideas. But in the final analysis, trust yourself. Trust your inner voice to tell you the right thing to do. All great businesspeople become great by listening to their inner guide. It will never fail to lead you to your highest good and heaven help the person who refuses to listen to it.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to start a successful business by trusting your intuition before you make a final decision:

First, always remember that the key to success in business is your ability to add value to your customers by providing them with something they want and need at a price that enables you to make a profit. Keep your thinking focused on the benefit that your customer will enjoy from what you are offering.

Second, get all the information you possibly can. Speak to as many people as possible. And finally, sit down quietly by yourself and listen to your intuition before you make the final decision. This is the best investment of all.