The No. 1 factor that prevents entrepreneurs from starting a new company or meeting goals is fear. Simple ways to check your fears at the door.

I interview entrepreneurs every week for my radio show. I also coach business owners over coffee and cheap bar food. The recurring theme across these conversations: overcoming fear.

We all have fears. But the good news is they're generally easy to overcome. Just look beyond them. Think it's easier said than done? Here are the common entrepreneurial fears I see and how to attack them:

Fear of Failing

This is the most obvious entrepreneurial fear: What if the business isn't successful? What if it doesn't work out? What if I end up living on the streets? The stats you hear about the likelihood of company failure would put this fear into any entrepreneur's mind. It's also the one you are most familiar with from the days of taking tests and turning in projects at school.

What to Do About It

Understand that every start-up is a failure at some point. If you look back on the original business plan, a company rarely, if ever, follows the plan as it was conceived. The difference between companies that succeed and those that fail is their ability to course correct. Make sure you pay attention to what's working and what's not, and continually work to capitalize on the positive.

Fear of Success

Believe it or not, success is some entrepreneurs' biggest fear. A hesitant salesperson is actually afraid that if he makes the sale, the company won't deliver on the promise he's made. Success brings the requirement to perform, to fulfill the obligation, and to manage scarce resources in an attempt to satisfy demands. Many companies fail because they simply can't service the demand, and their customers move on to a competitor.

What to Do About It

Find a fellow entrepreneur who is in a similar space. He or she has been there before and will have connections and advice to help you through. Look for resources you can borrow: an industrial kitchen if you are making a food product or a company's excess office space; or rent another company's equipment to get the job done.

Fear of Starting

One of my colleagues once gave me some great advice about getting started on a big task. She told me, "How do you eat an elephant?" The answer, "One bite a time." OK, it's a little creepy, but you get the point. Often we are so overwhelmed by the task ahead of us because it looks too big and daunting that we just don't start.

What to Do About It

It may sound simple, but just simply start! If you are going to write a book, write 350 words a day and you are writing about a page. If you are going to start a company in a space you have never been before, find a mentor or spend some time interning with a company you respect. Do something small today for the future you want tomorrow.

Fear of Loss

This fear grips entrepreneurs who have built something up and are afraid to make a change or go in a new direction. They are afraid that the new direction will put what they already built in jeopardy.

What to Do About It

Realize that the second you stop innovating your company, you are already slipping. There is no such thing as maintaining the status quo in the entrepreneurial or small-business space. If you think you are afraid of losing what you already have, then know that unless you take some risks, you are already headed down that path.

Entrepreneurs are a resilient breed. You know how to take a need, problem, or bad situation and capitalize on it to build something great. If you can remember that your entrepreneurial instincts make you more likely to succeed and to learn from a failure, you have nothing to fear.

What’s the best kind of Push Notification? One that tells you you’ve made more money of course.

Stripe Push is a little side-project that sends you Apple Push Notifications whenever you get a new charge or transfer via Stripe.

You can configure what type of notifications you want to receive and their frequency. I’ve open sourced the Sinatra and Mac app behind it on GitHub.

Get it from the Mac App Store.

Focusing on a smaller number of customers might actually fuel your growth instead of impeding it. Here are four ways to make it work.

Growing means expanding your business, right? That's what many entrepreneurs and CEOs assume they need to do. But, in almost every successful growth story we've seen, the CEO has done exactly the opposite.

In a recent article, Growing Like Gangbusters?, we discussed the three things that companies need to do to adapt their business as they grow. As they move from a start-up to an established company, they need to adapt their organization and leadership model. But, at the same time, growing companies need to find a way to create more value for their customers, and then scale that customer value.

Small entrepreneurial companies need to adapt to their customer needs, adjusting their business model accordingly to grow revenue. But once you've built a successful company, you've also likely built a reputation and distinctiveness around a specific product, service, or customer segment. CEOs who are able to sustain this growth actually get more narrow in their focus, which allows them to scale the business around that key strength.

The CEO of Rise Interactive, Jon Morris, recently told us, "We focus on doing one thing well: Helping companies drive traffic to their website."

Duncan Barbaro Sant, a director at Alberta, a 200 employee fire, safety, and security company based in Mriehel, Malta, shared his plan of action. "Rather than focusing on winning all the projects we come across and trying to spread our wings further than we possibly can, we have taken to choosing carefully the projects that make sense for us and that can sustain the company's healthy growth," Duncan told us. "This will give us the time to monitor and exploit all the projects we are being awarded/accepting whilst keeping our clients faithful to our company."

Here are four things CEOs can do to narrow their customer focus and create more growth:

1. Find your most profitable customers. Do some back-of-the-envelope math to rank order your customers in terms of high to low profits. The customers that pay more and cost less to serve are creating the most value for your business.

2. Understand the unique needs of your most valuable customers. How are they different from your less profitable customers? Identify the drivers of why they rise to the top.

3. Understand what you are doing for these customers that no one else can do as well. Determine your key strengths and the offerings that they find the most value in.

4. Ruthlessly prioritize and focus organizational resources and investment on these customers. Always choose projects and investment that favor your most profitable customers. Challenge yourself to free up time and resources to devote more to these customers.

Creating a narrower customer focus is somewhat counterintuitive to growth. But when it's done right, this approach typically results in more growth rather than less.

Send us your experiences with focusing on your core customers. We can be reached at karlandbill@avondalestrategicpartners.com.

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