Hire good help. A small businessperson is responsible for recruiting and managing employees for a new enterprise. Once the employees are on board, they often require specialized training and education to effectively perform the specific tasks needed. A common recruiting method that many professors use successfully is exposing students to various research subspecialties in senior and graduate courses. Know your market.
Successful businesspeople know the demand for their particular product or service.
Equally important, they know their main competitors and the strengths and weaknesses of each. This information can be critical when deciding where to invest time and money to attract new business. Similarly, engineering professors should know the demand for research in their area. If there is no demand, there will be little funding for that particular research effort. Knowing the strengths of your research program relative to others can help you make wise choices about which grant opportunities to pursue.