To be effective is also to learn from others who have already accomplished their goals. Having a mentor is an incredible blessing for an entrepreneur, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to find one. The path to a productive entrepreneurship may seem thrilling and full of adventure, but the reality is that being your own boss isn’t easy whatsoever.
As they say, with great powers come great responsibilities. Starting a business is one thing, but effectively managing it is quite another that you may need to tackle because each company has to go through its own ups and downs.
To this end, a good company depends a lot on how well you can cope with stress and face the obstacles that are inevitably bound to come along. If you don’t know how to get there and stay motivated throughout your journey, here are the top 10 tips to help you through this year.
So, let’s dive right into success!
1. Have Clear Business Objectives
An entrepreneur is someone who has a goal and a drive to create something. Keep your goal always open. Indeed, at times the bumpy road of entrepreneurship can make you feel trapped and helpless; hence, at this juncture, inspiration can play a crucial part.
Inevitably, you might find things getting out of hand, struggling to balance personal and professional life, or even struggling for funds. Having specific goals in all these unfavorable situations will motivate you to make a major difference between success and failure.
Many entrepreneurs are also seen losing patience and motivation as soon as they face obstacles because they are too early on trying to accomplish a major goal. So the secret to achieving long-term success is to set practical, measurable, and achievable goals. If you want to learn from successful people, notice how they all had clear cut objectives laid out in front of them.
The best part is to set realistic goals and provide both long-term vision and short-term motivation. That is, instead of setting ambiguous or vague targets, try to set simple and realistic objectives. Using as much intricate information as possible will help you stay on track and setting several micro-targets will give you the satisfaction of achieving goals along the way.
That can make a major difference when it comes to self-motivation. Small little tastes of success will help drive you through the tough times, significantly improving your chances of knocking out your bigger objectives.
At last, it’s best to rank the goals according to what you prioritize and start doing them accordingly so they leverage more profit to your business.
2. Strategize With Your Team
You can’t build a solid building unless your foundation is correct. Same way, without strategizing your plans with your team you are not going anywhere. In fact, this is the first thing you should do as soon as you start losing motivation and interest in the business.
At first, what you need to do is strategize with main organizational stakeholders including executives, managers, members of the board, and others. The team leaders will think about corporate entrepreneurship and creativity by brainstorming, community conversation, and other crowdsourcing activities.
What is the business lacking? How will the business overcome this? Are you missing out on anything? Involving the entire team early on avoids miscommunication which will not only motivate you, but will also boost trust and confidence in the team. Indeed, a well-informed and driven management team is backed up by the most effective organizational innovation strategies.
3. Burst Your Comfort Bubble
Alright, this is the most important part. We always want the highest results, the highest profits, and the highest fame, but when it comes to reaching your highest potential, we all somehow manage to stick to what we always have done.
If you don’t want your business to stay where it is, you need to change the way you have been operating it. In short, work twice as hard as anyone else in your industry.
You have to admit it, your brain is lazy. Perhaps because it has so much strength because there’s so much going on up there, it doesn’t want to do any extra things. It doesn’t know the difference between a good new habit and a bad new habit, and by remaining in your comfort zone, it tries to get you to do what you’ve always done.
What that means is once you have accomplished a single goal, don’t just settle in for that and celebrate the victory for the rest of your life. Instead, set the bar higher every time and aim to achieve a bigger and better goal every time. At the end of the day, no successful entrepreneur has got to where they are by staying in their comfort zone.
4. Hang Out with Like-minded People
You become the kind of person you hang out with. In fact, the best way to transform yourself as an entrepreneur is to hang out with people who are the way you want to be. Friends always have a great influence on you, so it’s always a good idea to get your source of motivation boost from people you actually love and care about.
It’s very important to have the right people around you in the business. The people you have in your social circle are going through all the struggles and achievements of your life with you; you’re going to go through high and lows, laughter or maybe cry with those people while they walk with you through your journey.
So instead of them draining your energy with mindless entertainment active, you can rather work on something productive. Or perhaps, if you are lucky and have successful friends – that’s even better.
5. Build a Great Team and Run Things in an Innovative Way
No one succeeds in business on their own, and any who try will lose to a better team every time. I bet you are always on the run for staying ahead of your competitors when it comes to your product, service, marketing but what about what’s going on in your business, what about your employees?
Either they are not going to be loyal with you for the long term or will constantly lack motivation, and with that comes the emerging problems in your business. If you want your business to succeed, be creative and find an innovative way to run your team.
For instance, ditch all the formal wear and go for casual clothing to have a relaxed and chill vibe in the office. As a matter of fact, most of the companies in Silicon Valley (home for global technology companies) are taking full advantage of having a chill vibe in casual wear and fun offices.
Another way is to incorporate games into your office. Wait what, seriously GAMES? Yes, you read that right!
Games will make tedious activities more enjoyable. If you add games, it might allow even the most uninspired employee to participate. It’s dull if the workers’ reward at the end of the day is the same check they receive at the end of the month. Using gamification in the office to spice things up and inspire workers to do more.
With that being said, along with your happy employees and thriving business, there is no way you are going to lack motivation in your own entrepreneurial success. Later, you could offer cash bonuses or days off to the person who gets the most profits or really anything that suits your company well.
6. Own Your Mistakes and Learn From Them
Remember, being an entrepreneur is like a firefight. You never know when you are going to have bad news and who must be able to tackle it and learn from it rather than running away from it. Most businessmen/businesswomen look to failures as their best teacher. When you benefit from your failures, you’re getting back to success – even if you’ve originally failed.
It is so profoundly rooted in our nature that the mere thought of loss makes us more mindful of our actions. If you just want to remember when you fell from the top for the first time and injured yourself only to know that those were the first unknown steps. In turn, when it comes to a loss, there is still an overarching theory that helps you to discover and think about failure.
When we speak of business, Bill Gates once said that your most dissatisfied customers are the greatest source of learning. Let angry consumers tell you where the flaws in your business are. Assuming what consumers want or need is never going to lead to results. You have to ask them first, and then listen closely to what they say.
It may sound counter-intuitive to you, but failure is about the only action that contributes reliably to success. When we say that, we aren’t only referring to your own business. See what the unsatisfied customers have to say about your competitors’ businesses and make their weaknesses your strengths.
In other words, learning from loss is actually using your knowledge to re-develop ideas for potential progress. The truth is that success and failure become so seemingly entangled that successful failure gives rise to acts that eventually yield positive outcomes.
7. Use Other Entrepreneurial Stories to Motivate Yourself
“A smart man learns from his mistakes. A great man learns from the mistakes of others”. There are thousands of success stories of all sorts of people in the real world. Use these stories as a source of inspiration, and most importantly, benefit and leverage them. If you have a particular challenge you need to solve, look at how many have done it in the past.
Look around and see how successful legends turned failure into success and how they had that giant ball of motivation in them at all times, If they can do it, so can you. For instance, Steve Jobs is a remarkable entrepreneur because of his boundless advances, but also because of his emphatic return to seemingly irrecoverable defeat.
Jobs became successful in his 20s as Apple became a huge company, but when he turned 30, Apple’s board of directors chose to fire him out of the company – you wouldn’t be holding your iPhone if he stopped there. Another one could be about JK Rowling – a depressed single mother who was rejected 12 times before she became the first billion author in the world.
And there are hundreds of others. You see, it all comes down to square one – How consistent you are despite the obstacles you face.
8. Have Immense Self-Confidence
Self-ambition increases ambition to unprecedented heights; thus, an aspiring entrepreneur must have a high degree of self-confidence in his/her talents and skills. When you have faith and confidence in yourself, you tend to be self-motivated – a guaranteed formula to accomplish the ultimate goals.
Consequently, when you’re motivated, your temperament is assertive and positive, which keeps you focused on giving your best, while holding the strengths and weaknesses in the back of your mind.
9. Maintain a Healthy Routine
Stress is unavoidable, but knowing how to cope with it is essential. People sometimes fail to take care of themselves physically because they don’t feel good mentally. However, physical wellness can have a very positive impact on your level of motivation. Hence make sure you:
10. Reward Yourself After Each Victory
It can be quite daunting to work tirelessly for hours. Offer yourself benefits by rewarding yourself with a job well done. Regardless of how minor it is, your business accomplishments are an accomplishment in the ultimate success of your company, and enjoying yourself will only inspire more hard work.
Here’s what you can do to reward yourself:
For real, just go for it!
Successful entrepreneurs put out a lot of hustle to start a successful business. Being a founder/CEO is a job like any other, and it’s one of the most challenging pursuits out there. BUT it can be one of the most rewarding as well if you put in the time.
If starting and running your own business is a goal for you & if you’ve given every facet of the challenge careful thought, then go for it. You might just crush it.
Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.