3 Reasons why patience is important to success in business.
The famous line is that “good things come to those who wait.” The challenge in a fast-paced business world that seems to demand nanosecond decision-making is knowing what to wait for and how long to wait. While there are many avenues in the world of business that require patience to some degree, the three notable considerations below are crucial outlets to business success where patience can actually help to improve your financial performance.
Market fluctuations
If one evaluates the stock market independently, which can impact business performance via capital streams, one can easily recognize the volatility of the stock market due to a variety of factors, from natural disasters and interest rates to technological changes and supply and demand.
Further, the business world itself is subject to a great degree of volatility, with only approximately 20% of small businesses lasting at least 15 years due to such factors as lack of funding, poor management, a faulty business model or insufficient marketing.
Given these factors, the competition that you face today, and which seems to impact your competitive decision-making, may not be the competition you face a month, year, or even decade from now (when you’ve outlasted the competition!).
That’s why it’s important to identify which factors are important for any contingency planning and decision-making and which factors are more likely to be transient interruptions and distractions on the road to success. For example, fiscal policy, interest rates, and even political decision-making can have long-lasting impacts on the prices of supplies or consumer spending habits.
Taking such decisions into account, or creating contingency plans in the event that such deviations occur, would be prudent to ensure financial success. At the same time, making business decisions based on a competitor’s fad advertising campaign, the latest social media craze or a freak storm that occurs would not necessarily lead to long-term success.
When you are patient and have a long-term plan with sound contingency plans to respond to potential fluctuations and deviations, you are capable of accommodating a long-term path to success that can stay on course when encountering bumps in the road rather than others’ wrong turns.
Product development and refinement
Businesses, particularly entrepreneurs, are either dealing with new products, services, marketing strategies, or brands in order to differentiate and succeed. Doing so requires a great degree of trial and error.
Companies spent $493 billion in 2019 alone on research and development costs, with timelines for launching a new product or service taking anywhere from 10 weeks for an app to 12 months or more for a clothing line.
Given these costs and time constraints, hasty decisions can actually cost money. Having a patient, long-term perspective on the actual timelines and costs involved in seeing a business proposition to fruition can better prepare the development, marketing, and management teams to handle actual problems that arise rather than misunderstandings relative to unanticipated aspects of launching an idea.
As haste makes waste, being patient will help you to navigate the course followed by many to effectively bring an idea to the marketplace.
Improve your networking and social cohesiveness
Succeeding in business is as much about social management as it is about developing a good product and managing finances. Social prowess in business can involve everything from developing reliable supply chain contacts to developing a network of clients,
customers, and affiliated businesses that can provide products, support, and consultation, or managing a team to consistently provide the best product. In any of these components, you are dealing with people, and dealing with people requires patience.
There is some subjectivity to what pace leads to greater productivity. On the one hand, constantly demanding results yesterday can lead to higher rates of burnout, lower productivity, disenchanted employees, and poor team cohesion which can actually cost more money than what is gained from a rapid product turnover.
At the same time, some fields, particularly software development, entail a certain degree of fast-paced development and decision-making, which can lead some employees and firms to thrive. Understanding the nuances of your respective field with regard to pace and productivity is critical, but also understanding how other firms operate can help you to modulate your sense of timing.
In general, having a sense of understanding, a willingness to accommodate the fluctuations and deviations inherent to dealing with people and a sense of patience to wait for quality products rather than quantified production invariably leads to better performance rather than meeting an anticipated bottom line.
Ultimately, wherever you are in business, having a sense of patience to wait for producing the best possible product or service often leads to better results than rushing around in a fast-paced environment.
If you’re looking for long-term success that outlasts your competition and helps to establish your business as an industry foundation, then maintaining a degree of patience and long-term vision is critical to meeting your business goals.
