Owning a business means making multiple decisions daily. Focus on what you want to get accomplished each day and week is one of the fundamentals in creating a successful business. The challenge comes in staying focused on what is important and not being led astray by putting out fires that are not as important but have become critical. Here are three tips in helping with keeping your focus.
- Know your goals. If you don’t know where your destination lies, any road will take you there is the old adage; this is also true in making your daily decisions. If you know driving revenue is the top priority in accomplishing your goals, the phone call from a prospective client becomes the most important call of the day. If you lose site of this, putting out fires on the job site and calls from employees with mundane questions override this priority.
- Work on one thing at a time. Multi-tasking has become too much of a norm, but research shows the tasks you do in conjunction with each other end up with lower quality outputs. Talking on the phone with a prospective client while trying to trowel out a skim coat ends up with a client who feels they aren’t a priority and a skim coat that probably could have looked better if the focus had been there.
- Do one thing that promotes your goal each day. As a business owner, the last thing you want to feel at the end of the day is that you wasted too much time (or the entire day). Focusing on your goals and breaking your goals down into daily and weekly activities needed for their achievements is a great way to do this. If your goal for the month is $40,000 in revenue, you’re looking for $10,000 weekly or approximately two average jobs. To achieve this goal, you can place advertising that will get the phones ringing, follow up with a client who said they may need your services in the future a few weeks ago, or any one of a number of things that bring you a little bit or a lot closer to achieving this goal. At the end of the day, you’ll feel better about your time management and you’ll also have a more successful business in the long run.
