Are you always working on the most important thing?

For most people that have their own business getting this right truly is a game changer. When you stop doing the things you normally do and work on the most important thing right now, you will make break throughs!

When you first start a business, there are just hundreds of things that need to be done and they are all important and that’s alright. But once you have opened and are operating, you will realise all these jobs aren’t equal. You need to know these thing:

• Are you are breaking even, and if not, how long you can last before you go broke?
• Do you have enough staff with the right skills to run your business and when you get busier you will be able to find more?
• How to get more customers, what they want and need and how to make them become regulars?

I have had many clients that really don’t know if they are making money, some even know they are not but think it is just too scary to know exactly how bad it is. They just hope it will come right.

It is critical to realise that knowing will help you to focus and create the sales and actions that will stop the bleeding. Working hard and making improvements on sales will help you sleep at night.

That sounds like a good deal, a good night’s sleep for improved sales. But this strategy also means no sleep for poor sales improvement. In my world view, that should also be good and may be the very thing that encourages you to get urgent, do something different and get help.

Don’t look for help on how to sleep better, for that is just the symptom! Look for help to grow your sales and run your business better and a better night’s sleep will come as you start to succeed.

Sustainability is a word we often hear used these days and mostly it is used in context of the environment. Primarily calling out single use products, use of materials and resources that are finite or, worse still, practices that damage the larger environmental balance and equilibrium.

Measuring and making your business sustainable should also be a part of your business mindset from the very beginning, after all, we all want there to be a future.

So, speaking of the future, acknowledge and value your dreams, by their very nature they will probably seem beyond achievable and impossible. But when a person breaks their dreams down into hundreds of smaller goals, relentlessly works on them and continually sets new goals, dreams definitely are achievable and do come true.

Continuously achieving goals and not burning out can be a challenge but by continually adjusting the intensity of your timeline, showing empathy and being patiently impatient, you will prosper.

So when you are doing the most important things first and building a sustainable business, you have created a platform you can scale but you need a plan to connect it all together.

In business, we convert our dream into a vision and create a plan of 1 year, 3 year and 10 year objectives. On the journey to realising the vision, building a valuable business, doing good in your community and creating a solid income, you should aspire to having fun. There will always be new challenges and change is constantly just around the corner but stay humble, enjoy learning and doing the work:

• The most important stuff now
• Make your business sustainable
• Follow your dreams and set goals
• Never give up

It is definitely a good time to set some goals for the next year or five and remember to be ambitious. Anything less will most certainly result in a waste of opportunities.