by Nigel Hilton

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There is a lot of advice online about how to run a successful business. A lot of it is incredibly important and contains the kind of information that is extremely valuable. However, a lot of these articles and blog posts seem to forget one incredibly important thing. That is that the heart of any great business is made up of people. Businesses and clients and customers, these are all words that we use forgetting that, when it all comes down to it, they are all just people. If you're not able to connect with people then you're never going to be able to run a successful business. With that in mind, here are some of the people that you need to connect with in your business.

Customers

The most important people that your business needs to be able to connect with is your customers. After all, without customers, you simply don't have a business at all. One of the biggest changes over the last several years is that customers don't really want to feel like they're being marketed to. They want to feel some kind of genuine connection with your business. Social media is one of the best tools to allow you to do this. You can talk directly to your customers and create an incredibly strong emotional attachment in a way that has never been possible before.

Employees

It's all too easy for business owners to forget that their employees are real people with limitations and needs. It might sound awful but far too many employees fall into the trap of treating their employees like just another resource. You need to be able to communicate clearly with your employees as well as let that communication work both ways. Your employees need to feel able to come to you about any issues that they have when it comes to their working conditions or the business as a whole. If they don't feel like they're being listened to then they're just going to become frustrated and resentful of your business as a whole.

Other businesses

One of the most common problems that a lot of business run into is that they see any other company as inherently a competitor. However, it's actually an incredibly important step to be able to connect with the people in other businesses. For one thing, it means that outsourcing certain aspects of your business becomes a whole lot easier. Connecting with a company like Ernest Packaging can make life so much easier for you and your business. Remember that there are other businesses out there that can help yours and not every business is inherently a competitor.

This might all sound terribly obvious but the truth is that a lot of business owners get so wrapped up in the mechanics of running their business that they completely forget about the fact that they are still just dealing with people. If you can't keep that in mind then you're always going to be working at a disadvantage, no matter how good your business is.