The most valuable businesses build long-term trust instead of chasing one-off sales. Startups often fail by seeking rapid growth without an existing trust base. Assess what trust you have, identify what you need, and estimate how long it takes to bridge the gap.
Build relationships, not transactions. I have found that the, the most valuable businesses are the ones that build trust with their market, with their customers, and have their customers coming back for business over and over again. You can see this all the way down to retail, all the way up in professional services, across into technology and low-tech, whatever it might be. You want to build trust with your customers and trust will always take time. So When you're thinking about going about building a business, you're thinking, oh, I'm just going to go make something happen right now and that'll be great. I'm going to go raise a whole bunch of money and then go. I have found most of the time it doesn't work that way unless you have pre-existing trust relationships, i.e., now you're cashing in on that trust you've been building for the previous N years. Ask what trust do you have, what trust do you need to create, and what is the time investment that's going to be necessary to get you from here to there? When you're focused on it, it doesn't have to be forever, but it's not a single transaction. Relationships pull earth and fall.
