No matter how good your business model or potential earnings are, if you keep practicing bad habits, you are restricting your growth potential. Here are 8 common habitual behaviours that have a negative impact on small businesses and how they can be broken.
Stop Overworking!
Productivity does not come from exhaustion. Business owners tend to take on all the tasks and not delegate their workload. This not only burdens them with mundane operations but averts them from focusing on the core competencies. Outsource your work load or assign tasks to your team. Invest time in training your employees in areas of weaknesses. It may seem like a costly investment but the dividends are high. If you are operating solo and the workload is growing, invest in hiring or develop some strategic partnerships.
Stop Procrastinating!
Engaging in unproductive activities such as checking your email, reading online articles and checking your social media does not get the task done. We often delay the task as we believe it is too difficult or to avoid the perceived risk of failure. Keep a diary calendar and schedule every meeting or deadline. At the start of every working day, make a list of everything that needs to be accomplished and the challenges that may be faced. Prioritise your tasks and tackle the high priority and most difficult tasks first.
Find the Right Balance
You’re your own boss so you can work when you like right? Unfortunately, not. The late nights and working weekends are usually a result of an unrealistic workload or procrastinating during the day. A task dragged out overnight could be completed in a much shorter time in the morning when productivity is high. Try to keep your working day to structured hours. People are more proactive when they have a routine so stick with it. Ensure you are getting the recommended hours sleep each night and lead a healthy lifestyle. Your mind will be clearer with a more regular sleeping pattern.
Manage Your Cash Flow
This is a common bad habit with at times, devastating results. Your business will not survive if you do not properly manage your cashflow. The most common mistakes are:
- Overestimating your potential sales
- Impulse spending, typically around the startup phase
- Being passive about past-due receivables
- Not using a cash flow budget
- Not keeping an emergency backup – you will need it
Cash Manager can help you stay on top of your finances and understand your business performance at a glance. Don’t become the part of the shocking statistics of small business failures due to the poor management of cashflow.
Get Rid of Self-doubt
If you didn’t think your product or service was worthy, you would have never entered entrepreneurship. Fear of failure is an unfortunate inherent of human behavior and its clutch can be detrimental to the progression of any business. Self-doubt usually comes from bad experiences or fear of failure, both of which are challenges that will be faced by business owners. Your journey to success will be limited if you do not believe in yourself and take risks.
Up Your Security
Small business data protection can begin with the human side of security risks. Educate your employees on data and system integrity and create policies for staff usage of social media and the internet. All passwords need to be strong and changed regularly, especially after staff turnovers. Examine different control systems that offer protection and regularly review your organisations information security policy to incorporate new forms of data protection. Switching to cloud based services may give you more security than on premise infrastructures.
Keep Up with the Times
Small businesses must keep up with the times and understand the importance of an up to date website that is mobile-optimized. 88 percent of consumers who search for a type of local business on a mobile device call or go to that business within 24 hours. This is not a statistic to be ignored. Ensure your business contact details are up to date and accessible from a mobile and desktop search.
Think of the Future
When was the last time you checked your business goals to see if your current journey is aligned? Most business owners are so focused on the day to day operations that they do not look at the bigger picture and the future of their actions. Schedule a time either at the beginning or end of your working week to review your business progress, goals and how to get there. Once a quarter, have an in-depth reflection and reconsider your strategies.
CashManager accounting software has successfully been helping small business owners and their accountants efficiently manage their cashflow and understand their performance at a glance since 1992. Find out how we can help your business grow.
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