When your business is going smoothly and sales are rolling in, you might feel tempted to get complacent, sit back, and relax a little bit. Don’t make that mistake! Your old enemy, demotivation, is always around, and you’ll need to keep it at bay by consistently, persistently taking action. Here are a few of my tips to stay motivated when your business starts to settle down.
#1 – Focus on Growing, Not Running, Your Business
As an entrepreneur, your primary goal should be on growing your business, specifically by finding ways to increase profit. Yes, it’s important to find a way to stabilize your business and make it run on autopilot… but if you insist on running things yourself, you’ll always be in danger of stagnating and burning out.
If you make RUNNING your business your primary goal, the routine will eventually grind on you. There will be days when you feel sick and tired of your business, and you’ll just want out. Trust me, you WON’T like the feeling when it comes to you.
So again, focus on growth and expansion. Always have an exit strategy or endgame plan for your business… whether it’s to sell it one day, or train someone to run it for you.
#2 – Get Over Business Failure Quickly
When billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson was asked what he thought was the biggest mistake new business owners make all the time, he said simply: “Not getting over failure quickly enough.”
And I couldn’t agree more. New business owners certainly take failure personally, as I did when my first few attempts at building a business went bankrupt. But it wasn’t the failure that set me back—it was how I REACTED to the failure. I ended up being discouraged, feeling worthless, or simply studied the failure for far too long.
Since then, I’ve learned that failure isn’t personal. It happens even to the best entrepreneurs out there. The key to their success is that they learn from their failures, make the adjustments quickly, and get right back into the game.
And that’s exactly what you should do, too. You’ll fail anyway, so might as well fail QUICKLY!
#3 – Implement Great Business Ideas Quickly
Finally, when a great idea occurs to you, or when a great opportunity comes by, I suggest you put them into action as soon as you can. As long as they don’t spread you too thin, and as long as they stay true to your personal business plan, go for it!
The danger in delaying action on good business opportunities and great ideas is that they may not be relevant several months down the line. If there’s a good opportunity to increase your business’s profitability RIGHT NOW, then you got to take it RIGHT NOW, as well. The opportunity might not be there next week!
What if the opportunity doesn’t pay off? That’s fine—chalk it up to experience. But what if it DOES pay off? Congratulations—you’ve discovered a fantastic new way to increase your business’s bottom line!
Keep these three tips in mind as your business settles down, and you’ll achieve more business success in much less time.
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