Most entrepreneurs start businesses because they love something. Maybe they love to make things, or love being the boss, or just love the idea of making money. Whatever the reason for starting a business, we can usually find love at the root.

There is a critical difference between growing your business and maintaining a stable business. Both are challenging and require work, but there are significant differences in how you approach marketing for each.

Check in with your business and establish whether it is at a critical growth transition point. What we know is that all entrepreneurial companies signal the need for transition with common symptoms. When we see them, we know it’s time to either change and grow or stay the same and flounder.

What are your business priorities? Many entrepreneurs say their priority is to grow, but when we look at their financial statements we see that most of the money and energy is actually going into just keeping the business afloat – paying for existing products and business overhead such as rent, salaries, etc. If you want to actually grow your business, then you need to put your money where your mouth is and invest in growth strategies.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how we can work smarter, not harder in business. If you want to do this successfully, then the first thing you need to do is take a long, hard look at three critical components of your business.

The national paradigm of how to succeed as an entrepreneur has turned on its head and is in the process of disappearing completely. It used to be that if you had a good idea and worked really, really hard, you could succeed in business. Not anymore.

After the past two years, you have probably cut your expenses down to the bone, so I’m guessing that now you’re a lean, mean business machine. But now it’s time to pull your head up out of the bottom line and focus on top-line growth, which is the only way that you can truly grow your business. In my experience, most companies can easily increase their profitability by 50%-100% in as little as 6-12 months. That’s an amazing opportunity, but most companies squander it by failing to apply the following basic rules to driving top-line growth.

To grow your business, you must look in the mirror to determine how you are holding it back from success. Every single one of us can achieve greater business success if we can only learn to push beyond our personal limits and exceed our own expectations.

A lifestyle business means that you essentially have a job. You have the flexibility of an entrepreneur, but you really need to show up to work in order to keep the business alive. You are at the fulcrum of your business, and it likely won’t survive without you. An asset means that you are building something bigger than yourself. It means that you have your eye on an exit strategy in the next 2, 5 or 10 years. Not unlike a real estate investment, a small business that is treated as an asset is designed and groomed to be sold to a larger company. You will get a single, big payday so that you can move onto your next adventure – completely free to start something new.

Fewer than 10% of people who set New Year’s Resolutions achieve their goals … and that only includes the people who actually bothered to take the time to think about them! While everyone else in America vows to lose 10 lbs or climb Mount Everest in 2008, may we suggest that you use the New Year as an opportunity to review your business goals? If you’re like many entrepreneurs, you have grown organically, which means that many times growth happened without you setting down firm