FailingCompany - Back to the Basics

I've been thinking a lot lately about habits. We have all heard about the power of habits and the need to break bad habits. If you're like me, your first reaction is to roll your eyes. As basic as the topic seems, I think it's incredibly valuable to evaluate your habits.

Habits absolutely do fall into two categories: 1) Bad habits that distract us from achieving our goals and 2) Good habits that help move us towards our goals. We must inventory both types of habits in our life and make crucial adjustments if we want to succeed.

Think about your day from the time you wake up until you go to bed. What do you do when you wake up? Do you check your email, text messages and social media first thing? This habit, while it seems harmless, doesn't move you towards your goal. What if you meditated in the morning to ground yourself? Then perhaps practiced some gratitude to focus on all the great things that you have in your life? Then created a list of the top 2 or 3 most important things to accomplish that day to move you towards your goal? Would these new habits have a big impact on your life? I believe they would!

What do you do throughout your workday? Do you spend countless hours taking breaks or chatting with friends and co-workers? Do you spend lots of time wordsmithing emails to get them perfect? How about building the perfect slide for your presentation? Do these things really create value? What if you created a new set of habits? Remember that list of the top 2 or 3 things to achieve that day? The one you created early in the morning. Pull it out, put your cell phone in the drawer and get hyper-focused on accomplishing those 2 or 3 items. These items will actually move you towards achieving your goals. Do this every single day and watch things transform before your very eyes. You simply won't be the same person a year from now!!

You accomplished your top 2 to 3 goals for the day and are ready to head home for the evening. Do you go home and binge Netflix all night? Meet up with friends for drinks for the 3rd or 4th time that week? Spend hours catching up on Social Media or watching TikTok? All of these are fun in moderation, but none will help you accomplish anything. What if you read a book on a subject that you needed to learn to advance your business? Maybe you work on that next YouTube video that you've been wanting to produce? You could hit the gym and take care of your body or lace up your walking shoes and go for a walk. Would these habits help you succeed? Of course they would!!

Developing powerful habits takes a little effort, but it's totally worth it! I've heard before that doing something 99% of the time is a b!#ch, but doing something 100% of the time is easy. This is the power of habits. Doing something consistently everyday builds muscle memory. It becomes second nature. Doing something a few days a week quickly becomes the thing we cut out when we're too busy or too tired. Change your habits and you'll change your life!

Need help developing strong positive habits to achieve your business goals? Make it a habit to check out FailingCompany.com to find someone to help. Go sign up for an account or log in to your existing account and start working with someone today.

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I wrote last week about the parallel between vacation and business. While at the beach with my daughter, I saw a warning sign about rip tides. That inspired me to keep with my vacation theme this week. Do you think I'm onto something or am I getting sucked out to sea??

A rip tide is a strong narrow current that heads away from shore out to the ocean. There is a very specific way to get out of a rip tide. If you find yourself caught in a rip tide, you want to swim to your left or to your right. That will afford you the best chance of swimming out of the tide and saving yourself. If you attempt to swim straight to shore, you will only exhaust yourself and get pulled out into the ocean or drown. Swimming to the left or right allows you to work with the problem rather than against it. It's a simple formula, but you have to know it. If not, the results are devastating!!

So, what do rip tides have to do with business? If you're in business for any length of time at all, you will run into problems that can exhaust you if you don't know the formula. These problems may have a very simple formula to solve it. However, we often roll up our sleeves and swim against the current rather than seeking out the formula. We find ourselves further away from a solution after lots of hard and wasted work. If we had just taken the time to seek out a formula, we may have solved our problem quickly and easily.

Why do we do this? Perhaps it's pride. We want to solve the problem on our own. Maybe we're a little too frugal and don't want to pay someone else. It could even be that we simply get so focused on the solving the problem that we don't take that brief moment to look for a better way. Regardless of the reason, we find ourselves being pulled out into the ocean when we could have simply swam to the left or the right and been free. Crazy, right??

Next time you encounter a problem, take some time to see if there is a formula to solve it. It may save you a lot of time and struggle. Heck, it could even save your business. Your time will be well spent and you'll be much less exhausted!!

Can't find the formula to your problem? You may find the person with just the formula you need over at FailingCompany.com. Go sign up for an account or log in to your existing account and start working with someone today.

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I'm currently packing for a beach vacation with my daughter. While packing, it dawned on me that there is a strange parallel between vacations and business. I don't mean the need to take a vacation from your business. I'm referring to the way we go about preparing for both.

If you're like me, then you tend to over plan and over pack for vacation. I create a long list of everything that I "need" to take on the trip. I also create a detailed itinerary of what we'll do once we get there. I then proceed to spend the entire week before the trip gathering up all this "stuff" and getting organized. Perhaps I'll even go to the store and buy lots of new things that I really need to take with me. I work myself to death over planning. I then get to my destination and I'm exhausted and ready to relax.

What happens next? Inevitably, the vacation doesn't go according to my detailed plan. I quickly make a new plan when I get there and we have a really nice plan. What happened to all of that "stuff" that I packed? I lugged it into my hotel room, unpacked it, NEVER USED MOST OF IT, then packed it back up to come home. It really weighed me down.

How does that craziness relate to business? When launching a business or planning to grow an existing business, we all build a plan. Right? We need a plan to get us pointed in the right direction. Also, just like planning for vacation, we feel like we NEED all sorts of things before we can get started. We feel that we must buy equipment and supplies, we need to attend countless trainings and read several books or perhaps we need lots of new contacts and prospects. My point is that we accumulate lots of baggage before ever getting started. When we actually start the business or begin executing our growth plan, we end up throwing half that baggage out the window. Worse yet, we let it weigh us down and hold us back from moving as fast as possible. Just like me lugging all that luggage into the room when I could have been laying on the beach enjoying the waves and sun!!

It's OK to do some initial preparation, but don't let yourself get caught in the trap of needing to have everything worked out and in perfect order before you start executing your plan. And when you start executing, it's ok to deviate from the plan if needed. Preferably, because your metrics tell you it's time to do so. If you do find yourself with a lot of unnecessary "stuff" that you accumulated, don't let it hold you back. We often feel obligated to do a certain thing or use certain equipment or services because we invested in them. They are SUNK costs. The money is gone forever. If the stuff doesn't serve you, then throw it out and move forward in a more profitable direction. If it helps you to be more comfortable, then think of it as training costs...lol.

Travel light on your business journey. Pack just what you need to get started and pick up the rest on the way. This allows you to get started earlier, learn on your journey and be much more agile when you need to pivot!

Have you already accumulated a lot of baggage and don't know what to do with it? Perhaps your pristine plan fell apart when you launched your business and need help with a new one? WE can help! There are "Organizers" and "Planners" waiting to help you over at FailingCompany.com. Go sign up for an account or log in to your existing account and start working with someone today.

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As many of you know, I'm still in the corporate world. Having one foot in the corporate world and the other in the small business world, I see a lot of contrasts. However, one thing that I see in both places is lack of consistency. That's what I'll talk about today.

To accomplish anything big, you need to create a plan. You also need to set up metrics to measure your plan and know that you're on track. Why would you deviate from the plan unless the measurements tell you that you're off course? I find that baffling, but see it ALL THE TIME.

What I see most is impatience. The leader gets impatient and wants to see results sooner. He or she thinks that changing things around will be just the ticket. Inevitably, the work slows down due to the starts and stops. The leader gets the opposite result. It's normal to want to see results, but you have to trust the process. It's like watching an oak tree grow. You can watch it for a month and see no progress, as oaks grow slowly. You get impatient and decide to dig it up and move it to another part of your yard where there is more sun. What you've really done is disturb the growth process. It'll take even longer to show progress now. Being patient isn't glamorous, but it's highly effective. If you would have followed a growth chart for the oak, you would have known that the process is working as expected. Do the same in your business. Follow your metrics and don't adjust the knobs unless necessary!!

I also see people deviating from their plans because they are influenced by someone else. Perhaps they view the person as an expert...or more of an expert than them. Perhaps they just really respect their opinion. It may even be that the person is just easily swayed. Either way, the plan is thrown out the window and the process gets reset. Progress is lost for no good reason and the leader gets frustrated that it's taking so long to see results. If someone has a different idea, then great. Hear them out. Then review your metrics with them. If you learn that you're measuring the wrong things, then by all means change. Otherwise, stay your course!!

Perhaps you're having trouble devising your plan or you don't know if you're measuring the right things. Maybe you've been a victim of trusting someone's opinion vs objective metrics. There are experts waiting to help you over at FailingCompany.com. Go sign up for an account or log in to your existing account and start working with someone today.

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I'd like to honor our country's independence this week. For those of you in the United States, this Sunday marks our Independence Day. More commonly called the July 4th holiday. The holiday celebrates the passing of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. It signifies everything that our country stands for in one day.

Thinking about the unbelievable risk that our founding fathers took when they declared independence is inspiring to me. If the declaration failed, they would all have likely been killed for treason. This country was truly taking a leap of faith by cutting itself off from the immense resources of Great Britain to achieve a new vision of freedom. A truly magical thing if you really think about it!!

We can draw some parallels between the the United States setting out to achieve a vision and our own businesses. Most of us go into business to achieve freedom. Whether it's financial freedom, freedom to choose where and when you work, freedom to take & pick your kids up from school or freedom to be your own boss...we're all choosing freedom. We all have a vision of something grandiose that we simply must go after. And like our founding fathers, we're willing to risk it all in pursuit of the dream!!

Sometimes, while in pursuit of our dreams, we become slaves to our business. This is all too common when things aren't on track. It's precisely these times that we need to celebrate our own independence day (launching our business) and vow to keep pushing forward. Take massive action to break free from the bonds of being controlled by your business. Take the reigns and take control of the situation so that you once again can enjoy that freedom that you so desperately desired when you set out on this journey. Also, just like we celebrate our country's Independence Day each year on July 4th, mark a time on your calendar to celebrate your independence day each year. It's a good reminder of why you started this journey and a motivator to stick with it.

If you are a citizen of the United States, then please take some time to celebrate our Independence Day this Sunday. We have the freedom to start the business we want because those that came before us risked it all! If you need help regaining freedom in your business, don't hesitate to head over to FailingCompany.com. Go sign up for an account or log in to your existing account and start working with someone today.

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