What keeps you up at night in owning a business?

For those men and women who find their precious sleep shorter and shorter these days due to business ownership concerns, there can be myriad of issues to worry about.

Face it; many business owners worry that they’ve hired the wrong person or persons, something that certainly can have a negative impact on one’s business.

Having a clearly defined target customer is critical to making your business successful. It can inform all aspects of your marketing, including product and packaging innovation, communications, channel management, pricing, and promotions, and ensure that your marketing is effective and efficient. But, many businesses (small and large) approach customer targeting as an afterthought. They wrongly assume they can (or should) appeal to everyone or think about targeting only in terms of basic attributes like demographics.

Once you’ve had the inspired business idea and you’ve wooed investors with your plan of action, what else should you be thinking about as you establish your business?

Before you get to the interesting part of cracking on with the job itself, you must complete all the necessary tasks that will ensure your business becomes a well-oiled and profitable machine.

Although mobile technology is quickly changing the telephone landscape, there will always be a need for traditional phone systems in the business environment.

Cloud and VoIP technology is helping to take phone systems one step closer to the future, which is good news for your business.

Ray Kroc, the legendary visionary behind McDonald's, once said, "If you are green, you are growing. If you are ripe, you rot." Kroc's message was clear. If you fail to boost your business in growth, your business is on its way out the door. Take Kroc's advice to heart by growing your business. Boosting your business consistently can seem like a big task, but there are many small methods you can employ to make it happen. Study some of those methods below.

No matter how hard you work, if you are trying to expand your small business, at some point you are going to need money from an outside source. When that time comes, you will need to carefully consider where your business is, where you want it to go, and how you’re going to take it there.

It is an undeniable fact that people nowadays are using less and less paper. A perfect illustration of this is the rapid decline in the subscriptions for newspapers and magazines. Media outlets that used to publish their content on print are now slowly making their transition to the web. And of course, more and more people these days prefer reading their news from their iPads, tablets, and laptops. The reign of print publications is nearly over. This decline in paper usage is also seen in businesses and various institutions. For instance, accounting firms are now storing data from their clients digitally instead of having them filed on paper folders. Most documentation processes these days no longer require paper. Digital storage cards have replaced paper files and folders.

According to Pew Research Center, about 90 percent of American adults have a mobile phone and 79 percent of them use text messaging, or SMS.

With so many people using text messaging, businesses can increase their brand visibility by leveraging SMS marketing.

There is a wide acceptance of the fact that unit costs are reduced as the size of a manufacturing run increases, allowing economies of scale. There are many other factors to consider, however, before rushing into an increase in output simply to reduce the unit cost. Other considerations have to include the potential demand for the goods, whether they have a limited shelf life and whether there are outside influences that might affect the potential market in the near future.

Most of us have probably taken part in a whole boatload of SWOT analyses. Certainly, in my time as a marketing consultant, companies have shared numerous SWOT analyses with me. They all seem rather basic, Marketing 101 kind of stuff. Yet, just because SWOT analyses are basic does not mean that most companies carry them out well, or that they even get them right.