When It Comes to Starting a Business, Trust Your Gut That little voice is telling you it's time to start your dream biz! These tips will give your startup intuition a boost.

When you start thinking about owning your own business, you caneasily be misled by the attitudes and opinions of others. Sometimespeople will encourage you to get into a business you shouldn'tget into because they have nothing personally at stake. It'svery important that you do your homework thoroughly in advancebefore you make any decisions.

The Essence of Business Success

The essence of a successful business is really quite simple.It's your ability to offer a product or service that peoplewill pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs-ideally threeor four or five times your cost-thereby giving you a profit thatenables you to buy and offer more products and services.

To succeed, you have to add value either by bringing the productor service from another place to where you're selling it or bycreating the product or service and selling it at a price higherthan your total cost of production. You become wealthy either byselling a few products or services at high prices, or by sellingmany products or services at lower prices with smaller profits.

The best strategy, of course, is to aim to sell a larger volumewith a smaller profit on each item. Most great fortunes in Americahave been made by selling large quantities of products over a widearea, thereby broadening the target market and reducing abusiness's dependency on just a few customers.

For instance, let's talk about selling yachts rather thanchewing gum. There are few fortunes that have been made fromselling yachts, but there are major fortunes that have been madebased on selling chewing gum. A basic rule is this: If you want todine with the classes, you must sell to the masses.

Go From the Known to the Unknown

Early in my business career, I learned another key rule forbusiness success and it's simply this: Start off in anestablished field, and only experiment with new products orservices out of your profits from your established business.

One reason many entrepreneurs fail is that they have grandioseideas of being the first into the market with a brand new, untried,unproven product. Don't fall into this trap! As you begin tomagnetize your mind with visual images of wealth and success, asyou begin looking everywhere for profitable ideas, you'll beginto attract the people and opportunities you need to achieve yourgoals. I've learned from long experience that you must learn totrust your intuition, your gut feeling, concerning any businessdecision.

So read every publication, explore every opportunity. Remainopen to all ideas. But in the final analysis, trust only yourself.Trust your inner voice to tell you the right thing to do. All greatbusinesspeople become great by listening to their inner guide-itwill never fail to lead you to your highest good. Heaven help theperson who refuses to listen to it.

Action Steps

Here are two things you can do to start a successful businessthat involve trusting your intuition before making a finaldecision:

• First, always remember that the key to success in businessis your ability to add value to your customers' lives byproviding them with something they want and need at a price thatenables you to make a profit. Keep your thinking focused on thebenefit that your customers will enjoy from what you'reoffering.
• Second, get all the information you can and speak to as manypeople as possible about your idea. Then sit down quietly byyourself and listen to your intuition before you make the finaldecision.

Brian Tracy is the "Success Secrets" coach atEntrepreneur.com and one of America's leadingauthorities on entrepreneurial development. He's producedmore than 300 audio and video learning programs that cover theentire spectrum of human and corporate performance.