Being an entrepreneur can be the most rewarding or thankless of jobs. You need to be CEO and janitor, and sometimes all in the same hour, to ensure that deadlines are met and important tasks are completed. Plotting a path to entrepreneurial success is never easy. For those like Lloyd Claycomb II, who have for decades mastered being a successful entrepreneur, developing the necessary skills for success has been second nature.

For others, the right path may be go your own way or look for good advice about how to become successful as an entrepreneur. Here is great advice about two key things that will help you get to the top of your business game.

Making the Customer the Priority

When you build your business you will be often overwhelmed with important issues related to keeping your doors open. These will include: lost sales, payroll, employee underperformance, ineffective marketing and sales campaigns, unexpected cost overruns, product shipment issues, and dozens of other daily challenges that both consume your time and push you to your mental breaking point. Through this all you may feel like life is not fair and that you for once would like things to be about you and your needs.

When this occurs, you must suppress any impulses that do not translate to your putting the customer first. Your very business will depend on it.

Every successful business today must always operate from this POV and make sure that each employee gets it as well. The customer must be the focus and the one, whose care and interest is considered first, last and in-between. Customers today have many choices no matter what the product or service. If you are a business serving local customers, in addition to your local competitors, because of the Internet, you now have competition from around the world and what keeps your customers coming back to you is the way you treat them.  So take a deep breath and maybe even a day off to relax and then stay focused on making the customer happy.

Charitable Support of the Local Community

One of the tenets of a successful entrepreneur is that he or she generously donates time and money to local causes. Through the company, the entrepreneur may support a local Boy’s or Girl’s Club, a Cancer charity, or provide funds or other needed support in the event of a disaster. These acts cement the entrepreneur and his company within the community. This giving back to the community not only makes the whole experience of running a business more rewarding, it also fosters the type of environment within and without the company that create happy employees and venders as well. Successful entrepreneurs know that by exhibiting these charitable acts, you create the circumstances for the community to be strong enough to create the next set of successful entrepreneurs. So being committed to charitable causes in the community is great for entrepreneurs and their companies.

These two tips may seem either obvious or not that important, but rest assured that they will be difference makers for your business. Remember, they key is to truly integrate both into your organization to get the most benefit from them.