I went downstairs the other day to use the gym equipment, and I saw a note that my son had written on a whiteboard, and it stopped me in my tracks. It said, “Do the boring work”. It was a note to himself. How many of us are guilty of prioritizing the fun, shiny parts of our business and dodging the other parts?
The work you’re avoiding may be the boring parts, scary parts, or the tedious parts. There’s something in your business you’re guilty of avoiding. Usually these are the parts you need to mostly work on because the reason you don’t want to do them is you’re not confident enough in those areas yet. I want to outline four areas that I see the biggest gaps in my students’ businesses. The good news is once you become problem aware, you can make a plan and a process for success. These first two strategies I’m going to share today are things that happen early in the process. And then next week, I’m going to talk about things that happen later in your system.
- Lack of consistency
You’re being pulled in all different directions with all these nice distractions. When something doesn’t go the way you want in business it’s so easy to do something else or decide you don’t like it. If you can make consistency a habit, you’re gonna fly by all of the other people. Start by making a list of all the areas where you wish you were more consistent in your business. After you make that list, go through and prioritize and you put them in order of what things are most important. Then, figure out if these things are something you need to do monthly, weekly or daily. After you do that, you decide which one you need to accomplish first.
Take a bite-sized goal here and work on being consistent with one thing for the next month. At the end of that month, I want you to celebrate! Improving your business one little bit at a time will make you so much more effective in the long run. The key to success in business is not about being better, smarter or having some fantastic idea that no one’s ever thought about. It’s about being more consistent than everyone else.
- Skipping or tweaking the steps
In our community, I’m always saying “trust the process”. First, you have to have a proven, well-oiled machine of a process. I’ve been running my photography business for 27 years and I spent years creating a process so that things ran smoothly. I made every mistake that anyone could make. And I think this is what makes me a good coach because I’ve been there.
As I matured as a business owner I was able to look back at my system and identify where I went wrong. We’re photographers, we do almost the same thing for every client, or we should. The images are gonna be a little different and the session itself might be a little different, but everything else should be the same. When I went back and I looked at where things went wrong, it was always because I skipped a step in my system. I spent years honing my system and making it perfect. Ask yourself, what could I have done in the system to serve the client better, to make it easier for them to order, to make sure that I photographed the right thing that they want to order because they got to the end and they couldn’t make a decision.
This concludes part one. Next week, we’re going to talk about the gaps in business execution that I see popping up later in this session. These two first steps I feel like happened earlier in this session, and next week I’m going to talk a little more about what happens after this session.
