Brad Sugars believes there are three challenges to running a business:  team, time, and money.

You have to identify the key personnel you need on your team and put in place the processes that empower them to deliver on the business goals and vision.

Business is a deadline driven discipline, which can lead you into an inefficient mode of chasing fires and eat up all your time for strategic planning.  It is imperative that you find the time to focus on growing the business and developing the business strategies.

In order to make the time necessary to grow, you have to find a way to get out of the day to day running of the business.  If you find yourself dealing with one fire after another, then you are not effectively managing your time.

Finally, you need money to make money. Initially you have to secure the capital and equity to build and grow your business while making sure that you are generating enough profits to provide a reasonable return. Managing your money involves more than just capital though, you have to stay on top of your cash flows. A profitable business which has a big gap between its payables and receivables collection can actually run out of operating cash in a hurry.

Brad Sugars explains that the optimum business model will keep all three areas of your business working together in harmony with each other:  sales and marketing, finance and administration, and operations.

Brad Sugars believes that if a business is not growing it is dying. It is imperative to have a sales and marketing strategy in place that will continue to increase the revenues over time. It is impossible to grow long term profitability through cost cutting measures alone. In order to grow, your corporate culture must support risk taking and innovation, because if you are not making mistakes then you are not moving forward.

Brad Sugars does not believe in just blindly taking risks though.

You have to be able to plan for the incremental revenues that are needed to offset the incremental costs. In the end, you must have a testing process in place that determines if the initiative made money. If it made a profit then it was a good program, if it did not make a profit then it was a bad initiative from which you can learn and revise your future plans.

Just because your business is running well you should never fall into a complacent mode of operation. Brad Sugars believes that every day as the owner of a business you should be working on learning something new. If you are not learning something, then you are just wasting your time. By continuing to seek out new strategies and learning from the experts in your field, you will insure that you are moving your business forward. The technology and speed of business is constantly changing, even if the foundations and principles are the same.

You have to stay on top of new developments in your industry, in team development, and in systems and technology to keep your business competitive in the future.