7 Productivity Habits of Successful Business Owners
By Terry Gormley
Over the course of many years in business, I’ve worked with and for many successful business owners. Having successfully grown three separate 7 figure companies from scratch, I know that starting and maintaining a small business takes huge amounts of commitment and tenacity and time is a precious commodity.
In this article, I’ve chosen to look more closely at the unusual or potentially useful habits that I’ve come across working with other entrepreneurs and business owners to increase productivity and effectiveness. How can we all be super-efficient? These, often simple, habits include an interesting mix that enhances focus, organisation and personal happiness which leads to a happier life and success.
1. Let all of your non-scheduled calls go to voicemail. This stops many of the interruptions that steal our time, even though we mean well by being available. Instead, return calls at the end of the day, and if someone really needs to reach you make sure someone else – a PA or colleague – can deal with a call and decide if it’s really an ‘important’ call.
2. Move and deal with a task. For example, take a conference call and walk at the same time. I do this a lot. It helps me manage my “state” if the call is at all stressful and it gives me exercise at the same time, saving time later in the day. Just make sure it’s not noisy where you walk and that you can keep a good signal. There are medical studies that show the brain neurons fire off at a higher rate while the body is active.
3. Commit to get healthy. Make time for sport or exercise and make it sacrosanct in your diary. Block off, say, Monday, Wednesday and Saturday for some kind of exercise. From full-on gym work to Yoga – choose what you love not something you feel you should do. That way you’ll stick to it. The mental and physical discipline required to maintain the activity becomes a great metaphor for achieving anything outside your comfort zone.
4. Build exercise into your daily routine. Do sit-ups or press-ups or dips while the kettle boils for your morning brew! You could easily fit in around 20-30 of each if you tried. If you work in London, walk more. Everywhere in the centre of London is much closer than you think and you can practice making calls as described in number 2 above. Get a device like a Fitbit or Garmin and start to record what you do – it will inspire and motivate you. When you are fitter you can achieve much more.
5. Use virtual assistants to reduce what will be a seemingly endless stream of small but important tasks you try to tackle. Get good at ordering your thoughts around what you need to get done, then writing a succinct and clear “brief” for outsourcing those tasks. It will significantly boost your productivity. For example, research on market segments you might want to target could be outsourced. Or break up a complicated project into small pieces that can be done with a series of tasks. It might take a VA only two days to produce a 15,000 word glossary for an FAQ section to your web site, which will impress visitors and save you lots of precious time.
6. Take a “Clarity” break once a week. Nigel Botterill famously built his business on “90 minutes a day” which was time working on his business and not in his business. The least you should do is 90 minutes a week. No phones, no laptops – just a notepad and your thoughts on how you can improve any and every aspect of your business. You can also take mini Clarity breaks. Spend half an hour every day and get out of the office to clear your mind and get some exercise.
7. Work from home at least one day a week and make sure the day is planned in the diary to focus on more of the strategic things you will have identified in your Clarity breaks. It will make you feel great achieving three solid things well than trying to do 10 things in a haphazard and interrupted way when it’s easy to be distracted in the office. Plus, your team will get used to working on their own initiative and appreciate that you trust them and don’t micromanage them. Nobody likes that!
Hopefully you’ like these ideas and may well be using some of them already. Many of the businesses that Fidelis team reviews as possible acquisitions are very well run by successful business owners. Often, we see businesses that are successful despite themselves! Those companies are often valued below what they might be worth due to a lack of knowledge or exposure to best practice on the part of a business owner. Or just sheer overwhelm.
If you think you might suffer from any of that and maybe holding back on selling as a result when you know you should or want to, then don’t hesitate to talk to us anyway – you’ll get a genuinely sympathetic ear.
At Fidelis, we are always pleased to hear from business owners who are looking to sell or exit their business. Wherever you are in the process, for a confidential, no-obligation discussion please get in touch.
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