I have passed a milestone. Twenty years ago I decided to take a chance on myself and I ventured into the world of business ownership. As I think back over the past two decades, I am reminded of many people I have met along the way. Some were employees, others were customers, some were vendors, and still others were just great people who were part of a network of professionals who became friends of mine.

What has 20 years in business taught me? Everything! I liken running a business to playing baseball. You can read about it, listen to people talk about it, study it, and watch other people do it, but you cannot fully understand it until you pick up a bat and try it for yourself. Here are a few memorable lessons I have learned along the way.

Relationships really matter in business

Most businesses are really about relationships between customers and the people with whom they interact. If your customer relationships are built on nothing more than "what can I get out of you for my benefit”, you won’t be doing business with the person for long. That goes both ways – from business to customer and from customer to business. Someone will feel used and they will decide to stop doing business with you or you with them.

If you have earned someone’s trust, take it to the bank

If you go a little deeper in the "relationships really matter” line of thinking, then you should understand that when a customer really trusts you, you have hit the mark as a business. The nature of what I do as a marketing consultant means that I often know some inner workings of my customer’s business before many of their own employees know it. But I am talking about more than just what angle they are taking at the next trade show. I have counted it a privilege when a customer entrusts me with a piece of information about their business or their personal life in confidence. Being at the top of a business structure is often a very lonely space. Earning the trust and respect of people at the top is important if you are going to be in business. They are the decision makers.

Hanging out your shingle only guarantees you will have to duck to get into the door

Marketing really matters in business – new businesses, old businesses or somewhere in between, we all need marketing to survive. You have to have marketing to compete for customers. I have talked to many people over the years who have wanted to start a business. One common misconception that clouds the reality of starting a business is that customers will flock to you without marketing. Just come up with a catchy logo and hang a sign on a shingle outside your office and you will have people in line waiting to see you. People expect a web site to do the same thing, or a brochure or a video. The truth is, you can come up with a creative name for your business, design a great web site or shoot a great video, but if you do not promote it with marketing, all of it will come to nothing. But I thought the creative stuff was marketing! It plays a part, but it is really just a tool that we use to gain the attention of people. Marketing gives people a reason to take a look at your web site, your brochure, or your video and to remember that logo on the sign outside your office. Marketing entices people to take the time to look. Then it invites people to find out more. It is a stepped approach that walks them closer to a sale.

Get used to change

Change is inevitable. It’s how you respond to change that makes you or breaks you in business. I think about the type of work that we were doing when I first started my business 20 years ago. What was a cutting-edge business service back then has been rusting in some technology landfill for several years now. We did business with paper and fax machines 20 years ago. Email was used primarily as an inter-office method of communicating. Cell phones were big and clunky and were just used to make phone calls (what else would you expect them to do?) But change in business is not just a technology thing. Attitudes change. New people rise to the top with different values than their predecessors. Many times that impacts expectations and that changes how you do business. It pays to stay attentive to those waves of change and to move in conjunction with them.

Find a need and fill it