In a way, the very meaning of being persistent is to strive to overcome difficulties, so this article is really debating a moot point. However, the reality is that when obstacles arise, or when you find it difficult to concentrate, or are lacking your creative muse, it can be very difficult to continue with your work.

Here are five things I like to do to encourage and motivate myself to persist during the hard times as a small business owner and entrepreneur.

1 – Believe in what you are doing

When it gets hard as a business owner, like when you haven’t made a sale for a while, or you have a mental block and can’t figure out what to do next, or you have suffered a rejection from a prospective client, you need to go back to basics and remind yourself why you are in business in the first place. You undertook the leap into the world of small business because you believed in yourself, and that hasn’t really changed deep down.

2 – Prioritise your work

I find this an easy way to overcome the mental blocks and encourage myself to continue to persist as an entrepreneur. Whenever I get stuck, I make a list of the tasks I want to achieve within a certain time frame. Then I select the most important task to do next. Listing out the jobs on my whiteboard helps too. Often I’ll even put down a time next to each task, and give myself a mini-challenge to complete the task in the allotted time. This helps me to focus and persist with what I need to do.

3 – Identify the roadblock

If you can identify what the problem is, and why you are having difficulty, you are one step closer to overcoming the obstacle in your path. One day I found I just couldn’t focus, and after a few minutes of wondering why, I realised I was just very hot and the room was stuffy. I turned on a fan, went and had a cold drink from the kitchen and when I returned to the computer, I found my energy and enthusiasm again.  Identify whatever is really blocking your road and then work out how to remove the roadblock to your creativity.

4 – Identify what you do NOT need to do

Often as a small business owner you can have so many different projects or tasks to complete. Having different deadline days for different clients helps me to prioritise what I have to do when, and more importantly, what I do not have to complete that day. This is part of time management and prioritising, only working on the essential work first.

5 – Forget perfection paralysis

One of the common obstacles we will all face is what I like to call “perfection paralysis”. Sometimes you can spend hours trying to research a particular point, or an hour trying to perfect one single sentence in a marketing message. Instead of spending so long on one point when you are stuck, move on to the next item or task to complete. Come back to it later when your mind is fresh and you can be creative again.

Don’t try to be perfect the first time around. We all need to rework a first draft, before sending it to the client. If you get stuck on a particular sentence or paragraph in a document for example,  it often helps if you write the next one anyway. Then you can come back and rephrase the sentence that was troubling you, once you have got back into the flow of writing again.

Being persistent in your tasks and projects will certainly pay dividends. It is worth struggling through the hard times to make your achievements even sweeter in the end. 

Photo Credit: photo credit: Brian Forbes

“It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition we discover” Henry Poincare

We don’t need to have a “sixth sense” to have intuition. Intuition is our own gut feeling or perception that something is right or wrong. For example, if your intuition is telling you that the process or product idea you are working on is flawed, you need to have the courage to act on that intuition and explore why it is wrong.

There are two key parts when using your own intuition about people, events, and processes in your entrepreneurial small business projects:

• the first is to trust your intuition.Without trust in your intuitive process, you may not have the courage or conviction to follow through with your gut feelings and end up with a project you personally feel is not up to your usual standard
• the second is to explore and act on those feelings.  Even if you trust in your own intuitive feelings about something, if you do not explore those feelings and take appropriate action, you may as well not have trusted your intuition.

Small business owners who can both trust their own instincts, and take appropriate actions on an intuitive perception about something are more likely to have a successful buisness. It all begins with yourself and your own reactions to your intuition and perceptions.

Trust In Your Intuition

Trusting in your intuition is not always easy. If you have a low level of self-confidence, you tend to avoid trusting in your own perceptions and will more likely take advice from others first. However, even those with high levels of self-confidence can find it difficult to trust something as vague as a feeling or even a niggling doubt that something is just not quite right.

The easiest way to learn to trust your intuition is to take some action on the niggling doubt instead of just leaving it to annoy you. When you get a gut feeling that something is wrong with the project you re working on, don’t ignore it. Instead, take the actions you would take if you trusted your intuition. If you explore the issue and discover that others felt the same way, or validate your intuition, it is easier to trust your intuition. The next time your intuition starts ringing those alarm bells, you will listen because it was right the last time.

Act on Your Intuition

When you take action on your intuition, you not only validate your gut feelings, but you work to improve the project. Allowing your intuition some input into the project allows you to explore and improve the project where it needs to be improved. Nothing is perfect, but when your intuition tells you that something is wrong, you can take the appropriate actions to make improvements.

So next time you get that nagging feeling that something is not quite right, listen to it and take the time to explore the reasons why.

Photo Credit: photo credit: swanksalot

Give Yourself the Gift of Time

When someone criticises our business, we tend to get defensive straight away. “What would they know?,” we think and instantly dismiss their criticism. However, if you give yourself the gift of time to consider the comments after the heat of the first emotion has diminished, you may well find something constructive in their comments.

The reason why we, as small business owners and entrepreneurs, tend to get so defensive about criticism, constructive or otherwise, is that our business is very much a part of ourselves. It has been formed by tapping into our own creative energy, and is therefore very personal. No matter how much we try to keep it at arms length. We have a strong belief in ourselves and knowing what’s best for our business. We can’t see our own errors, as easily as we can see someone else’s.

That’s why giving yourself some time to calmly consider whether there is any worth in the criticism offered will help you to become a better business owner. You need to be able to distance yourself from your business and look at as if someone else owned the business. The easiest way to do this is to do something else away from your business. Go for a walk, catch up with someone, read the papers. Give yourself some time to come back to it with a clear mind that is not still involved in detail of your business.

If you find yourself reacting in anger, or dwelling on something you perceive as negative that has happened, you may be better off doing something other than business tasks for a while. Give yourself the gift of a half an hour to think about the problem that is haunting you, and come up with an appropriate action plan to deal directly with the issue. Then, when you have calmed down and are no longer responding to your emotions, you will find your mind is clear and able to focus on your tasks again.

Give yourself the gift of time to think when you need it, time to recover from the heat and passion of negative emotions, and time to clear your mind to be able to focus constructively on your business.

What do you do when you are criticised? What kind of practices do you put in place to help you respond more calmly and helpfully to the situation?

Photo Credit: photo credit: wolfsavard

For many of us it’s the end of the financial year. It’s the time where we have to face up to the truth of how our business has fared financially. What that bottom line tells us. For some of us this is not a truth we want to face. For others it’s good but we can do better. I don’t think there are many small business owners who are ever completely satisfied with their financial achievements.

Having to face up to the state of our finances can be counter-intuitive as we often plan and set our strategies, goals and actions at the beginning of the calendar year. Something I’ve been talking about in previous posts on the health of your business and getting your business back on track.

No matter which way your business finances turn out, and I do hope that the numbers god has been kind to you, there are some practices you can put in place to reduce that end of year shock. You can:

• create a budget – groans and rolled eyes aside, a budget doesn’t have to be some massive spreadsheet with every single item and dollar accounted for. It does have to be reasonably detailed. One line for revenue and one line for expenses is not detailed enough. It should have all the major areas of revenue and expenses in it. If you are not sure where to start, use your detailed Profit & Loss statement to help you. If you don’t do your own accounts ask your accountant to print it off for you. They may even help you.

• review your Profit & Loss statement regularly – monthly at a minimum. Check it against your budget for any variances, particularly higher expenses and lower revenue. Investigate why there are variances, perhaps there was an unexpected expense, your revenue is more seasonal than expected, slow paying customers, higher cost of goods, you budgeted for the item in a different month. Knowing is better than not knowing. Then decide on the action you are going to take and, wait for it, take it. Sounds simple I know, however it can be all too easy to put it aside and forget all about it. Until the next month.

• develop a pricing spreadsheet – many small businesses, myself included, have different pricing structures and strategies for different products and services. We sometimes have different strategies for different client types. It’s important, actually vital, to make sure that your pricing strategy covers the costs of the business at the very minimum. This is your breakeven point. To put it simply this is where revenue and costs are balanced or zero. It also helps when you are developing a quote or a proposal for a potential client. You can feel reasonably confident that you have covered all aspects of the job, particularly if it’s a fixed price proposal.

That’s three of the things you can do to kick off the new financial year – no excuses.

One final tip which I heard a while back that really stuck with me and I use it when I talk with my clients about their financial goals and actions:

As a small business owner you must decide whether you are a ‘for profit’ business or
a ‘not for profit’ business (charity). If you decide you are ‘for profit’ then you must
be and stay on top of your finances.

To a very happy financial 2011 year!

Photo Credit: photo credit: Philippe Put

We’ve talked about giving your business plan a six month ‘health check’, how to look at the big picture and how to get your business to stay on track to achieve your goals for the year, but what about what you have already achieved?

You’ve worked for the last six months and your business shows it. Even if you have not yet achieved everything you wanted to in the past six months, you have still made some achievements. As the final part of the process of completing your six month review of your business plan, you should celebrate what you have achieved.

Go back to that helicopter viewpoint. Instead of looking forwards, this time look behind you. Look at where your business was at the start of the year. You could even find that your business has changed so much that your review entailed a substantial re-write of your business plan. When you look at the big picture, it is easier to see where you have been and how far your business has traveled over the past six months.

Next, drill down to the level of details. Look at each of your main goals for the year. As you calculate how close you are to reaching your goal, you are not only calculating how far you still have to go, but how far you have come. For example, if you have set your business an overall goal of growing by ten per cent, and you have grown by four per cent in the last six months, you can afford to celebrate this achievement. You may have to make some minor course changes to reach your overall goal, but that should not negate your sense of achievement in growing your business in six months.

Besides congratulating yourself for your business achievements, don’t forget to congratulate the others who have made your business success possible. You may want to share some celebration with your customers, without whom you would have no business. You may want to congratulate your customers on their business growth, especially if you offer a business to business service. If your service has helped your customers’ businesses to grow, you have a double reason to celebrate.

If you are a solopreneur, you often feel like you are the only involved in the business, but now is a great time to thank the people who support you by publicly celebrating your business achievements. Take your family or your spouse out for a special dinner to celebrate your business achievements.

If you have a business coach, don’t forget to give your coach a great big thank you by celebrating your achievements in your business in the past six months. Every one who supports you has helped you to achieve what you have in the past few months, so why not take some time out and allow your supporters the joy of celebrating your achievements with you.

Celebrating your achievements is important. It helps to inspire you and to renew your energy for the next six months. Celebrating your achievements gives you a positive focus to the task of reviewing your business plan. It is important to take some time out to celebrate your achievements, even if it is a simple celebration every six months when you give your business plan a ‘health check’.

When you review your business plan, don’t forget to notice and celebrate your achievements over the past six months. You have worked hard and you deserve to celebrate how far your business has moved in six busy months.

Photo Credit: photo credit: Mike the Mountain