You can’t be content selling somebody something one shot, if for the same time and effort you could position them and set the stage for them to want to come back every month and buy from you. Don’t set up a relationship with a customer unless you can set it up for a lifetime of purchasing transactions.

You’ve also got to decide to make networking and barnstorming with like-minded, success-driven people a continuous, daily part of your business life. You have to share real life experiences with other people, and get other people to share their experiences with you. Please do this, because it will give you the ultimate competitive leverage.

Why struggle? Why pay a consultant? Why pay an attorney? Why pay an accountant, if you can first pick the minds of 20, 30 or 220 people who’ve already been there? You can’t do that if you don’t establish relationships outside your office, outside your business and outside your industry.

Napoleon Hill, the chronicler of powerful and successful people, found that the most singularly recurring trait in 500 highly successful men and women he studied over a 50-year period was that every one of them created networks of people outside their field whom they turned to and talked to and collaborated with and counseled and got counsel from. They created “mastermind” groups. They brainstormed. They knew that two minds were better than one, and that 10 minds were better than two.

Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone. They all collaborated. They evaluated and critiqued ideas. You must develop your own “mastermind” group, too. And it doesn’t matter whether you do it informally by phone or if you do it in a very formal manner by organizing a group that meets once a week or once a month.

One of the fastest-growing businesses in the networking field charges you a hefty fee just to meet one day a month with 12 like-minded colleagues from 11 non-similar industries. But I’ve got good news for you: You don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for that. All you’ve got to do is create your own advisory group of men and women who are in business, who have been in business, and have traveled the road that you’re currently traveling. Tap their experience and advice, and you will positively catapult over your competitors.

Next, resolve to turn yourself into a personalized idea generator and recognize that innovation is your friend and not intimidating. All innovation is the capacity to bring a greater advantage or benefit to your customer or to your team members or your suppliers.

If you are the best customer a supplier has, they’re going to give you better prices and services and first dibs on all their best products and opportunities. If you’re the best employer, and you do everything you can to make your employees the best people they can be, they’re going to give you the best effort they possibly can. If you give your customers more of what they want, if you stand behind them and respect them, they’re going to stay with you.

You can engineer success into every action you take by engineering failure out,and that means focusing on projects in which you have a high probability of success and a low probability of failure. It also means conservatively testing before you commit massive amounts of time, money or personnel to a project.

To Grow, Think Growth

You’ll also want to make “growth-thinking” a natural part of your business philosophy.

My publisher is a great example of this. Every year they factor into their business plan a natural estimation,an expectation,that their business is going to grow by a certain amount. Then they sit down and figure out the easiest, safest and fastest way to get that growth, working backwards.

You can’t just squint your eyes and look up to heaven or the stars for divine inspiration. Growing your business by a precise and predictably substantial measure each and every year is a very easy thing to do when you work backwards, when you “reverse engineer” it. It’s much like the very successful people in the software business. If you talk to a successful software developer, he or she will tell you they are most successful when they work backwards to figure out what the software is supposed to look like and what results should be delivered at the end.

You can’t grow your business just by saying, “I want to grow my business by 10 or 20 percent a year or double or triple.” You’ve got to start by saying, “OK, if I want to double or triple, what has to happen?” If you know where you are now, it’s much like going to the automobile club and getting a trip map. There are two questions you have to answer before the travel representative can help you. You’ve got to tell them where you’re going to start from and where you’re trying to get to. If you don’t know both of these vector points, you can’t get anywhere.

So, if you know where you are now, and where you want to be, and you know what percentage of growth you want,you can work “backwards” and wind up going powerfully forward.

Let’s say you want to double your business every year. If you know you have 1,000 customers and you know right now that you have those customers buying $10 at a time, twice, you know that’s $200,000. If you want to double your business, and nothing else changes, and you don’t want to work on the size of the order, and you don’t want to work on the number of times a customer orders, what does that information tell you?

It tells you that to double your business, you’ve got to get 1,000 more customers.

Next step: Ask yourself, working backward: “What has to happen for me to be able to accommodate 1,000 more customers?” Well, let’s look at what you’re doing now. Whatever you’re doing to get the first 1,000, you’ve got to do twice as much. It may mean that you need two times the sales force. It may mean that you have to run two times the number of ads, or that you have to run the ads in two times the number of publications.

It may mean you have to send out two times the number of sales letters. It may mean you have to go to two times the number of trade shows. But it tells you what you have to do.

Whether you want to do that or not is your decision, but you can’t decide until you first work backwards. There may be a much easier alternative. Instead of expending twice as much effort, stocking twice as much inventory, spending twice as much money on salary, on letters, on exhibit expenses for trade shows and the like, there may be a better way.

Maybe getting a 50 percent higher unit of sale, and a third more transactions per year, would make it half as hard to double your business. All I want to do is show you that you’ve got to start by expecting growth to happen and then commit to that growth as a natural part of everything you do. Once you do that, you can decide whether you want to go by bus, boat, train, car or the fastest jet available.

The final element is reversing the risk for both you and your customer ,making it harder not to do business with you, harder not to take a job with you, harder not to sell to you, harder not to transact whatever kind of business you’re doing, because the payoff to the to the other side is so much greater just for giving you a try.

Taking away the risk,making it harder not to do something with you than to do it without you,is one of the biggest secrets to gaining competitive advantage.

And never allow yourself to do anything on a large level until you’ve first done it on a small, safe test level. If you follow that rule, you’ll be a marketing genius!

– You’ll always run the most successful ads.

– You’ll always use the most effective sales presentations possible.

– You’ll always be offering your products or services at optimum price.

– You’ll always be using the absolutely best risk-reversal technique.

– You’ll always be building your business with the most profitable and productive profit centers.

Why? Because you’ll test a lot of them inexpensively, and you’ll discard the ones that don’t work as well. You’ll only use the winners!

Mary Lou Garcia is a business coach based with business coaching firm, Team Works in San Francisco.