I have the privilege of working with business owners, people like you and me. Over the years I have spoken to hundreds more and heard or read the stories of countless others. I have learned five key lessons in my years of coaching:

1. No matter your personal skill or the quality of your products or services, no business can succeed without getting, and keeping, customers. Any business that can attract and retain customers can be successful, success revolves around customers.

2. Getting and keeping customers is all about marketing. Marketing is everything before the sale and everything after the sale. The sale is merely a milestone on the road you are traveling with your customer.

3. Marketing needs a plan. Who, what, where, when, why? The point of marketing is to drive customers to you. Marketing takes time and, most often, money. If you don't know what each customer actually costs, how will you know if your marketing is working? If you aren't allowing enough time to let your marketing work, you will never be able to find out if it would have worked. Invest in marketing.

4. They say that opportunity only knocks once. What I've learned is that opportunity doesn't knock at all, it's just sitting there outside the door. Our job is to be out there looking for it. If we're not willing to be out there looking, we'll never find it.

5. Know yourself. You can't control what you don't know and understand. My clients can tell me what happened. We can't change that. But, if we can figure out why it happened we might be able to create more effective strategies for the future. That knowledge is powerful.

When you take what you've learned and begin to apply it to your own situation you can create positive change and improve your results.