How to lead your business to the successes you desire

How to lead your business to the successes you desire.

Business! Holy moly! It’s an adventure, isn’t it? As a small business owner, it’s vital that you wear a lot of hats. Sometimes it’s hard to know what hat to wear as you lead your business to the successes you desire.

And often you are wearing all of hats at one time!

Here is the secret, the one thing that a small business owner needs to do (and do well) is to be able to lead themselves well. Just that alone can be a challenge. Why? Well, for one thing, if you are wearing a lot of hats your attention is pulled in a lot of different directions.

And with that, it’s like playing the game Whack A Mole. Whack A Mole is an arcade game in which players use a mallet to hit toy moles, which appear at random, back into their holes. AND it is also used with reference to a situation in which attempts to solve a problem are piecemeal or superficial, resulting only in temporary or minor improvement.

When you find yourself doing that more often than not, you aren’t leading you are really just being lead. As a small business owner, that is NOT the way to reach your successes.

You need to be in the driver’s seat of your business

The first thing you want to do is to assess your role. Are you behaving as a leader or are you abdicating your roll as a business owner? As in you wait for things to happen rather than being the driver of the results. Abdicating means fail to fulfill or undertake (a responsibility or duty).

An example for you. One of my client’s did not like to “sell” her services. She was a massage therapist. As you can imagine, her business was people-oriented. Which means, she needs to connect with people. Yet, she was so uncomfortable “selling” her services that she shied away from talking to people.

Before she came to work with me, here is what she did to “market” her business: she would put up flyers and post on Facebook that she had openings for the week. And guess what? She never got any business! 

My client was not in the driver’s seat and she was waiting for something to happen. She was abdicating her responsibility to herself and her business.

Once we changed her mindset about “selling” and put a plan together that felt good to her, her business blossomed!

How you can lead your business to the successes you desire

I always like to give practical action steps. So here are three things you can do right now to be the leader in and of your business.

1. Make sure you have a written plan. Know what you are going for and what you need to do to get there. 
2. Measure your results. Do you want 10 new clients? Know what your conversion rates are. (If you talk to 10 people and 10 say yes to you, your conversion rate is 100%. If you talk to 10 people and 5 people says yes, your conversation rate is 50% and that means you need to talk to 20 people to get your 10.) Keep track of your results, it makes it easy for you to know what to do (and to continue or stop doing).
3. Revisit the plan often and course correct as needed. As the business owner, you also are the lead strategist, you need to set time aside to review the plan and make any changes.

I also see a lot of business owners struggle with wearing the right hat at the wrong time. Are you guilty of doing something that does not lead back to the money? Say scrolling on social media when you really need to be making follow-up calls?

This is where if you were paying someone to do the follow-up calls and found them scrolling on their social feeds, you wouldn’t be to happy with them. So, think of yourself as the employee and work on what brings your business the money!

Do you struggle with doing the unimportant things before the important things? You aren’t alone. But if you are ready to lead your business to the successes you desire, I’m here to help. I’ve been there and I’ve done that! This is why I offer complimentary Business Blueprint Sessions. We’ll look at what you a doing now and how you can maximize your actions to your advantage! My gift to you. I do this because I am committed to helping small business owners lead themselves with less stress and more success.