Habits of a Successful Business Owner

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Michael and Jillian Leonard, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

Entrepreneurship is the polar opposite to being an employee. The good news is that you are your own boss, and can be as successful as you want to be. There truly are no restrictions. The bad news is that everything rises and falls with you. There is no safety net like there is with a career. So you have to make the choice about what kind of life you want to live, and what you want your future to look like.

What will play a huge role in whether or not you succeed in your business is the habits you create. It has been said that habits make up for over ½ of our life, meaning that 50% of the time we are on auto-pilot. That being the case, we want to make sure that when this does happen, we have the right habits in place to propel our business forward. The following are five habits that we found to be crucial to helping our business grow.

Habit #1: Schedule Time for Your Business

This can seem silly when you read it, but you’d be surprised at how often this gets overlooked by new business owners. Most of the time, new business owners are still working their 9-5, and building their business on the side. So after a long day at work, it can be easy to relax, and say you’ll get to whatever your business needs later or tomorrow. This is when scheduling that time to work on your business becomes important.

It doesn’t have to be 5 hours of time every day. You don’t want to burn yourself out before you even begin. Start small, even if it is for 30 minutes or an hour each day. One hour of working on your future is better than no time. This will allow you to build up that habit, where then you can slowly begin to increase the amount of time you work on your business everyday.

Habit #2: Big Rocks First

Figure out from the very beginning what the most important things are to help your business grow. When you know these 1-3 things, focus 80% of your time on those. These are the tasks/activities that help your business grow, create revenue, and help you build a sustainable business. All of the other things can wait, be delegated, or tossed out altogether.

It is better to get one thing done off our important list than 10 things off our non-important list. I know the love to check things off is real, but let’s make sure that what we are checking off actually creates success for us. We want to spend the most amount of time possible operating within our strength zones.

Habit #3: Continue Your Education

Make it a habit to never stop learning. The law of the lid states that we can only grow a business/organization to the level of our knowledge and leadership. Therefore, we always need to be growing and learning new things everyday.

Personally, I love to divide my learning into a bunch of different ways. Every day I read, for at least an hour. This helps me to gain new ideas and concepts that I can share with people I am coaching, as well as the rest of you. Every day I listen to at least one podcast. Some of my favorites include Jay Shetty, Tom Bilyeu, Lewis Howes, Brendon Burchard, and Rachel Hollis (to name a few). Lastly, I attend at least three conferences a year to help grow our business. The most recent conference was Brendon Burchard’s Influencer 2019, which was amazing! Going and hearing different people speak and immersing yourself in that environment can help take a business to new heights.

No matter your learning style, it is important that as your business continues to grow, you do as well. So many companies plateau because the leaders at the top stop growing. Make it a priority to not let that happen.

Habit #4: Batch Create Your Social Media Content

This was a game changer for us. We use to take an hour or two every day to do our social media. Between taking pictures, writing captions, and researching hashtags, we were getting burnt out. We then received advice about taking one day a week and creating all of our social media content for the following week. What a difference this has made in our business!

Instead of taking an hour each day to do our social media, we spend 4-5 hours on Saturday morning creating all the content for the following week. We also found that since we were taking that time all at once, our content became better, because we allowed ourselves to get into a flow state when it came to our work.

If you want to try this, set aside a block of time whenever works best for you, and plan as much as you can. It will definitely take the stress out of having to do it each and every day!

Habit #5: One Can’t Control the Other

Simply put: you can’t let your life be controlled by your business, and you can’t let your business be controlled by your life. They have to remain separate if you are to achieve the goals and dreams that you have.

When we allow our life to be controlled by our business, we are never really able to unplug from our work. It comes home with us, and affects our time we spend with our family and friends. We are always worried about our business that we are unable to be present in the moment, therefore life passes us by. The key is to realize that once you leave the building, work is over. Anytime after that is for you to recharge, replenish, and spend quality time with yourself and others. This means no work emails, no calls, and no texts.

When we allow our business to be controlled by our lives, we continually bring our outside problems into our work. We are never able to fully concentrate and give our best to our work because of other stressors. As difficult as this can be, we have to try and focus on what we need to accomplish in our business. There will always be challenges that occur in our life, so our ability to differentiate between the will play a big role in the success of your business.

Hopefully these tips will help you as you start your journey. I know that for us, some of these were the difference between us quitting, and us moving forward.