Business staples

[CJTodd89]

I'm a partner in a Cyber Security company and we provide security to medium+ sized businesses with servers and IT infrastructure. The problem is that security is a necessary evil and may cost a pretty penny with little-to-no ROI (except in that we work to ensure that your business and client information remains safe and protected). Also, there's no guarantee that we can prevent 100% of attacks to a network, but we do our best to keep the integrity of the business safe.

That's a generalization of what we're doing. It's a fairly new business that has kind of run aground since the CEO has his own life to be running and doesn't want to let someone else steer the flagship. It's more that he doesn't trust other people to run it. He trusts me, but apparently I 'don't think like a business person' so he wouldn't want me going off to meet and greet potential clients and not have the answers they want since the final say is not my own.

Well I kinda took it personally and I'm working on getting into that mindset. I found a mentor who has online webinars and podcasts and such and I'm learning a lot, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for. So what I'm going to ask is:

What are business staples that every business should have?
How DO business owners think?
What should I know about other businesses that I should know if I'm going to try to help build a company that provides services to other them?

[Freelancier]

What you should know is what that business might want from a business like yours and why they might want it and what they will want to pay for it. And you need to learn that for every type of business out there that you might consider marketing/selling to. Once you have that info, you'll be able to properly sell to them, because you'll understand the questions they're going ask before they ask them.