(Rockwall) July 28, 2013 – We all have our bad habits. If strum your fingers on the table, others at the table will tend to ignore it as long as they can before dirty looks come your way. If you tend to make fast friends but then disappear from the friendship as quick as you came, eventually people will stop trying to be a friend.
In business, if you keep up a bad habit, your business will desert you faster than if you strum your fingers at the table or have a hard time committing. Here’s 9 Bad Habits you’d better break quick if you want more good news in business.
- Not Knowing Your Habits. It goes without saying that you cannot change what you cannot admit. You “don’t know what you don’t know,” they say. So ask someone what your less admirable habits are.
- “Just Let Me Do It.” This one is chronic, and it’s something of a plague. It’s a hiding place for when we’re insecure and have a hard time trusting others.
- Putting Your Customers Ahead of Yourself. Do you run your business, or does it run you? If you’re not sure, then you just answered the question for yourself. You’ve got to slow down in order to speed up.
- Putting Your Customers Ahead of Your Business. Sound a bit strange? “Great Customer Service” is sometimes true. Other times it’s a cute way of saying “I’ll do anything without asking you to pay for it.” What looks like good service is bad for you and your customers.
- I’ll Wait Until I Have the Money. This one is dangerous, especially dangerous. It’s a nice hiding place for the risk-averse business owner. It’s a sure-fire way to not grow in business, too. Remember, it’s always better to use other people’s money to grow your business.
- Entrepreneurial A.D.D. “Squirrel!”
- Scrapping the Plan. Closely related to #6, a plan isn’t judged in the first 30 days you work on it. Good plans are worth 90 days at least. Excellent, well-executed plans take months, even years.
- Impulse Spending on Marketing. If you’re one of the very few owners who have never thought, “I’ll give that advertising a try” even when you doubted its effectiveness, then count your blessings. Most of us had to learn the hard way.
- Measuring the Wrong Things. What are you measuring? How consistently do you measure it? What does it tell you? How does that information inform your future decisions?
There you have it. You can probably think of several more. I’ll throw one more in there for good measure: Ignoring the Bad Habits You KNOW You Have.
By Blue Ribbon News special contributor Trey Finley of Rowlett, a business coach certified through ActionCOACH, the world’s #1 business coaching franchise, ranked #77 on Entrepreneur’s list of franchises worldwide. Visit his website at rockwallbusinesscoach.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/actioncoachtrey.
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