As a small business owner, the first thing you need to do is draw and describe the person that buys your product or service. Creating a generic description of your market that you guess will purchase it is not the best way, even if you’ve read 1,500-page text books about guerilla marketing and the like. You have to describe a very specific person, not a community of people. The moment you’ve consumed everything from your brain (and that of others) to describe this person, immerse this person into your business vision, mission, values and goals, and see if it fits. If not, you’ve got to rehash things with your sales, marketing, service, support and overall customer strategies to fit this person into everything that you do for your product, service and company.

I am what I am today, thanks to my seven years in-depth and hands-on experience in the three direct selling companies I worked for, the longest and best of which belongs to Avon. From a geek who often replied in single words, I can now express and describe a single term in multiple paragraphs and has no qualms speaking to large groups of people; besides the awesome people and sales management skills I learned. For someone who intends to be general manager one day, you’ve got to make “sales” part of your career itinerary because it simply goes a long way in molding you to the right future head of a company, large or otherwise. Direct selling is here to stay; you can’t discount the fact that it offers the lowly poor an invitation to succeed if he or she puts their heart and mind into it.

From the time you get a whiff of business cases and scenarios in college up to when your mid-life crisis starts and beyond, chances are you either dreamed of starting a new business (yours or someone else’s), attempted to put it on complex financial projections but failed, or have done so a few times yet it never sprung to life. Don’t be misled by my statement because I’ve done all three many times in my 25 years of working. Only one succeeded ’til today.