Business owners don’t just need to streamline their company’s operations—they need to streamline themselves if they want to be really successful. There are a lot of things that can hold you back when running a business.
Consider these negative personal habits and whether it may be something you need to address so that you can move forward and be truly effective.
Procrastination
We all seem to subconsciously think that when we decide to take on the endeavor of starting a business, we will automatically morph into some kind of superhuman business-runner with heightened senses and dulled emotions, but the truth is that we’re still the same poor schlubs that we’ve always been.
We take our bad habits and shortcomings with us into the business. One of the most stand-out and common habits we can bring with us is procrastination.
Quite honestly, if you’re a business owner, then you’re most likely not the procrastinating type; however, if you do have the tendency to put things off when you know it’s going to be difficult, it’s important that you take steps to remedy that condition. The pace of an entrepreneur’s day really won’t even allow you to indulge that habit, anyway.
Late Rising
You are the boss, after all, so you can sleep in if you want to, but that little habit has the potential to set you back quite a bit. If you do that, you’re starting behind right off the bat because there are only so many hours in the day and your workload is sure to be intense.
The early hours of the day are also the time when everybody else is working, so you’ll have a hard time getting things accomplished with other people if they’re awake and you’re not.
Avoiding Research
You can get away with it as a consumer shopping for a new mattress or a new TV, but you can’t get away with it for your own business. It’s really easy to go with the first attractive product that comes your way, but that won’t fly when you’re running a company.
There will be daily proposals, projects, partnership opportunities, and just common materials or vendors that you will need to check out thoroughly to make sure you’re not making a poor investment. Regular research is just going to be part of your existence as a business owner.
There are so many personal habits that entrepreneurs bring into their business ventures, that we could do an entire series on it, which will probably be coming to the blog in the next few weeks. The main idea that you should take away is to remember the position you are stepping into as a business owner and that a lot of what you have always done may need to change.
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.