Over the weekend the weather was extra hot and unfortunately rain was forecast for Sunday and the rest of the week. Determined to get my grass cut before it rained and grew even longer, I put everything aside that I’d planned to get the grass cut. What, you may very well ask, does this have to do with business?
If you’ve been in business for any length of time, there will be tasks that you put off until the last minute in preference to the parts of your business you love so that eventually they get so overdue that you have to do them. If these tasks are directly related to increasing your business sales and profits then perhaps you need to make time to do them more often.
Also, as soon as you start cutting grass you see an immediate improvement. It’s a shame that business results aren’t always so instantaneous and that can often mislead us into thinking that certain tasks aren’t giving us a return on our time. This is why testing and measuring your results are so important in business so that you can see whether the actions you carry out within your business are having a positive or negative effect on your business. You can do this very easily by creating monthly (or more frequently) profit and loss statements, tracking the number of sales you get, the amount of each sale, how many customers you have, how many products you are selling and in what quantities.
Your website can also be a great source for tracking and measuring your results and you can do this simply by installing tracking software such as Google Analytics. By tracking where your web visitors are coming from, you can focus more on the ways that are sending you the most traffic (so long as it’s converting traffic), what your visitors are buying and if they are leaving your sales funnel, where they are leaving and be able to do something about it.
Finally, imagine a garden with long grass (I’d of added a picture but my grass is cut!) and now imagine that some of the grass has been cut – does the picture look complete? Does it give you a good impression of the garden? No! The same is with your business practises and systems, half finished systems and tasks make your business look messy. Go back to the garden and visualise the grass all cut and the edges trimmed, now see the difference. Not only do you feel a huge sense of accomplishment and pride when your garden is looking good like this and it probably took you less time than you thought right? The same principals can be transferred to your business. The more attention you give to your business to make it look and run better, the bigger the rewards.
Now there will be those who say they outsource their gardening and get in a gardener and the same can be said for your business too, you can outsource many of the tasks within it. However, unless you know what you want the garden to look like (end result) and the tasks needed to get it that way, how can you outsource any of these tasks?
Well my garden was taken care off this weekend, now this week I need to take better care of my business!
