The most important thing that you should do is to make sure that your business is insured as well as it should be. After all, last thing you want to have happen is for your business to be insufficiently insured - especially when you consider all of things that could go wrong. Not only that, but there are also several laws that require businesses to have some types of insurance in order to operate.

Some of insurance policies are for catastrophic events. These are definitely types of insurance that everybody should have. For instance, fire insurance is pretty important - if there is a fire in your building, then you could stand to lose everything that holds your business together, and that will at very least result in loss of a considerable amount of your money.

Implementing changes, even when they’re good for your business, can be tough. As old adage goes, old habits die hard and it’s just as true in business as it is in our personal lives. It’s simply easier to take path of no resistance and revert back to doing what we’ve always done. Here’s a way to skyrocket your profit potential by linking change to pain and payoff.

Whenever I sit with a client who has hired me to assess and identify ways to streamline their business operations, we eventually get around to what I call "no pain, no change" discussion. I can present a neatly packaged assessment report with recommendations for increasing efficiencies or streamlining processes, but new efficiencies and streamlining requires change. And, change typically meets with resistance because way of doing things has become habitual.

As old adage goes, old habits die hard. It happens just as frequently in one-person operations as it does in businesses with 10s, 100s, or even 1,000s of employees. It's just easier to take path of least resistance by doing what we have always done. And, until you realize how 'doing what you've always done' dramatically affects your bottom line, change is less likely to occur. For any change in behavior, procedure or practice, there must be a desire for it - benefits of change must become more attractive than comfort of keeping old habits.

So how can a desire for change be ignited?

That's where "no pain, no change" discussion starts. Quite simply, I relate recommendations I make to actual bottom-line benefits. Let me demonstrate by using a real-life client example.

In a business assessment I did last year for a property management company, processing tenant payments was a four-step process from moment payment arrived, to final posting and deposit of funds. The company had two co-owners and four employees. Three of four employees were involved in payment processing procedure.