I have a friend whose mother found out how much a few food bloggers in the local area were making with their blogs and decided that was her ticket to success. The next day she slapped together a blogspot and started cooking. After two weeks filled with hours of kitchen experimentation, picture taking, recipe tweaking, and two or three blog posts per day, she became irritated that, despite her hard work, only three people were reading her blog and that none of the A-listers had given her any links. She decided that she would never amount to anything in the blog world and gave up. After two weeks.

Everyone knows about the hard work and passion that is required to start a real successful business of any kind, and most entrepreneurs are able to hit the ground running, but nobody talks about the waiting that’s involved. No matter what, success takes time. Nothing of value can be build overnight. It takes months and months to build links, networks, traffic, and brands, and entrepreneurs need to be prepared for that. It’s vital to the success of a business that the owners work out a schedule that is sustainable for the long-term. Patience and perseverance are just as crucial to a business’ success as passion and hard work. The businesspeople that make it past the post-honeymoon new business slump are the ones that have what it takes to make it big.

• Break the Rules This doesn’t mean you should stop caring about protocol or other good systems that are in place. But occasionally, you’ll want to try something new, maybe something a little risky, and see what happens.
• See Things Through to the End One of the most valuable resources any of us have is time. If you give up on a project or an idea halfway through, not only have you wasted the time you’ve already spent, but you’re also not utilizing the time necessary to make the idea work.
• Learn to Assess Any Situation A resourceful entrepreneur is able to take a step back from a situation in order to inventory what resources are already available and what other resources may become available.
• Discover What Tools are Available This could be people, money, time, supplies, networks, or any other resources. Perhaps there’s an under-utilized employee who has insight into a particular issue, or a software program that does something you didn’t know it could do.
• Improvise Sometimes you just have to fly by the seat of your pants and experiment. Whether because of time restraints or something else, every once in a while you’re going to have to just make a decision. Move forward with confidence.
• Be Proactive Inspiration often comes when we’re on our feet, not our butts. Sitting in meetings and brainstorming has its place, but by proactively working, a solution is likely to present itself.
• Be Persistent Giving up doesn’t do anybody any good (except your competitors).
• Act Quickly While some issues take some time to address, tabling the topic for the next meeting or saying “I’ll deal with it later,” isn’t being resourceful.
• Learn From Your Mistakes One resource you cannot put too much emphasis on is experience. You will make mistakes and that’s okay; just learn from them and move forward.

Encourage resourcefulness within your company and you’ll see efficiency increase, problems solved without your direct involvement, and a better-run business.

As an entrepreneur, at the end of the day you are ultimately responsible for what goes on in your business. And while that means you can take credit for the successes, it also means you have to take the blame for the failures. An entrepreneur with integrity holds themselves personally accountable at all times.

Playing the blame game is easy to do. It’s simple to think of all the things that should have happened or could have happened. Many of us are quick to play out in our minds a million different scenarios of what happened, and then imagine alternate universes where it didn’t happen.

Even if you’re a business of one, you may want to blame your customers, the Internet, natural disasters, or any other number of faultless things. In reality, there’s an issue with your product, your customer service, your website, or something else.

When dealing with a crisis, and trying to establish your own personal accountability, take some time to answer these questions:

• If this situation were to arise again, what would your responsibilities be? What role would you play?
• What is or isn’t being done to deal with the current situation?
• Is there anything about this situation that is outside of your control? What about this situation is within your control?
• How does your mission statement or vision statement address this issue? If it doesn’t, is there a change/addition to me made?
• What can you do right now to influence the outcome of this situation?
• What needs to be done differently in the future to prevent similar results?

Once you take some time to analyze the situation, you’ll be better prepared to solve the current problem and prevent future ones.

Again, the upside of this is the ability to take credit for the good things that happen (although you need to be sure to give credit where credit is due, or else your relationships will suffer.) But holding personal accountability in high regard will benefit you and your company for years to come.