What was your dream when you started your business? How close are you to achieving it? What are you doing to make sure you achieve it? What is stopping you?

Most of us struggle to achieve business success, often prevented from succeeding due to mental blocks we have placed on ourselves. I would like to provide you with a few thoughts that should help you stop prevaricating and start changing your business and achieving your goals:

1. Seize the moment
If you wait until everything is perfect, you will never achieve the success you want. The perfect time will never come and there will always be something stopping you.
2. Choose your own path.
Someone will always disagree or not approve of what you do. This is normal. Choose your own path and do not expect consensus or you will never change.
3. Improve your knowledge
Learn as much as you can and be as good as you can, but don’t wait to know it all and be able to do it perfectly before you do something. You will learn much more by doing than by not doing. It will hone your skills much quicker and more effectively than by simply learning the theory.

You will note that each of these is something you should do rather than wait, so the simple message from me to you is ‘get out there and start changing your business today……NOW!’.

I have never worked in any business or with any business owner where waiting has materially improved the performance of any business. Indeed many is the time, I have listened to a business owner prevaricating over decisions which desperately need to be made and which through delaying have led to the very situation they wanted to avoid or deal with in the first place. For example, a client of mine knew they needed to increase their prices but were frozen into indecision by a couple of major supermarket competitors. The end result was their profit margins eroded and their business plunged into losses. They failed to address this and when I started working with them it took 3 months to convince them to change their pricing structure (but do so in a sensible and structured way) as they were so concerned over losing sales. When they did get round to changing their prices they doubled their margin without materially affecting sales resulting in the business now making a substantial profit. The only outcome of delaying was to prolong a difficult position!

So how do you turn yourself into this dynamic decisive business owner?

1. Believe in your business
This is essential. If you don’t believe the dream how can you possibly succeed? Where will your motivation come from? So ask yourself, is your dream really worth pursuing and are you prepared to pour your heart into it?
2. Visualize your business’ success
Imagine your business succeeding! How does it look? How will you feel? Who will share it with you? If you really visualise what your successful business dream is it will energise and excite you making you far more likely to have the energy to succeed.
3. Expect it to be difficult
It’s not impossible, but achieving your business success is unlikely to be easy. In fact, it is likely to be hard. However, if you expect and are prepared for this then you are likely to cope with it far more effectively.
4. Take it one small step at a time
The challenges to achieving business success may be huge, but if you plan for it one small step at a time then even huge challenges can be overcome. Do not get overwhelmed, remember if you want to eat an elephant it’s best to eat it one small mouthful after another. Think what you can do within the year, the month, the week and then think about what you can do today. It could be as simple as calling a more experienced friend to get some help.

So where to start?

Well the first step is to set yourselves some longer term goals that will move you towards your dream. Remember what your dream was? Hold on to it. Now here is something that can really help you crystalise what you need to do. It’s our simple goal setting sheet and will help you develop some goals for your business and explore the tools you need to reach those goals. I hope it helps.