Business is an art as well as a science. It’s a matter of practical experience, judgment, foresight and luck. To be successful in business, you must master the basics of business success.

Fortunately, all business skills are learnable. You can learn anything you need to learn, to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. There are no limits–except the limits you place on your own imagination.

There are three major reasons why businesses fail: lack of money, lack of knowledge and lack of support. By mastering the basics of business success, you’ll gain the knowledge necessary to acquire the support and money you need for your business.

So just what are the essentials of business success? There are seven key areas of activity that determine whether your business will live or die:

Marketing. Your ability to determine and sell the right product to the right customer at the right time.
Finance. Your ability to acquire the money you need, and account for the money you receive.
Production. Your ability to produce products and services at a high enough level of quality and consistency over time.
Distribution. Your ability to get your product or service to the market in a timely and economic fashion.
Research and development. Your ability to continually innovate and produce new products, services, processes and responses to your competition.
Regulation. Your ability to deal with the requirements of government legislation at all levels.
Labor. Your ability to find the people you need, deal with unions, establish personnel policies, training and organizational development
And from this list, comes the very specific, identifiable reasons for business success:

Having a product or service that’s well suited to the needs and requirements of the current market.
Developing a complete business plan before commencing business operations.
Conducting a complete market analysis before producing or offering the product or service. Thoroughly developing advertising, promotional and sales programs.

author: Brian Tracy of of www.entrepreneur.com