Setting up a small business is very easy. You bring together the capital, labour, stocks and the space to carrying on the business. This is not enough to make your business a success

. You need customers in droves to make your small business a success. What you have to do is find out how to bring customers into your shop, make them buy, and ensure they come back to you again and again. Getting a new customer is important but retaining an existing customer is more important. For long-term survival of your small business the essential requirement is your customers come to you to buy instead of going to your competitors. Now how do you do this? Yes your success or failure is built upon this.

We all know ' Winners don't do different things, they do things differently'. For your small business to be successful you should also follow this mantra. Doing the same things as your competitors are doing is not going to take you anywhere. You have to find out what your customers needs are, how they would like to get this need satisfied and the most important thing how your competitors are providing this requirement to their customers. Then sit down and think how you can provide the same requirement differently. Let us take the case of a small business of a chemist and druggist. He provides his customers with medicines, tablets, injections, etc. Now think of something different. Providing the same services but with a little difference. You can provide your customers with something useful to them as an additional service. For example I have seen many people who find it difficult to go to their doctor each time for checking their blood pressure or their blood sugar levels. You can find a way to provide them with such services when they come to your shop to buy medicine. Depending on the demand you can provide this as a free service or a paid service. This is basically a convenience you are providing to your customers. This small difference in your service to your customers will lead to more customer satisfaction, his loyalty towards your shop increases, more customers start coming to your shop, the number of returning customers increases.

Like this you can think and come out with many other kinds of choices thru which you can lure new customers to your shop and ensure that existing customers continue to remain with you.

Finding out what your customers want is the first step to make your small business a success. It is very important as a small business owner to understand this clearly. Many small businesses close down because the owners fail to see what exactly their customers want, how they want to have it and when they want to have it.

Go ahead, all you small business owners, put on your thinking hats and find out these secrets which are open to everyone but nobody has thought about them so far.