Running a lifestyle business is not as easy as it may sound. As is true of all types of businesses, whether online or offline, there is a lot of work required to keep things running smoothly and efficiently on a daily basis.
For a lifestyle entrepreneur to succeed at building an online business, yet still have time to enjoy other aspects of their life such as traveling or spending time with family, they need to be efficient with their time. Whatever amount of time they decide to allocate to working on their business, they need to be highly productive during that time in order to make it count.
To maximize your productivity as a lifestyle entrepreneur, there are certain habits that you should adopt into your daily routine. Adopting these habits will allow you to minimize the amount of time you spend working on your business (without sacrificing its growth and success), and still have time to enjoy other areas of your life.
The 9 habits listed below are what separate the productive and successful lifestyle entrepreneurs from the ones that are still struggling to build a profitable and sustainable business online:
1. Set goals and review them every day
To succeed in any business, setting and reviewing your goals is key. Most entrepreneurs are already goal oriented people, but where many of them fall short is in writing down their goals and tracking their progress towards those goals regularly. On the other end of the spectrum are entrepreneurs who set too many goals, but fail to make any real progress towards any of them due to overwhelm or procrastination.
We’ve found that the best way to set and review your goals is every 90 days. For each 90 day period, identify your most important project or priority for that period. From there, break up that project into smaller milestones (ie. create monthly or weekly targets). These milestones will serve as benchmarks that you can easily track your progress towards.
We also recommend you write down your goals daily (ie. when you first wake up or before you go to sleep at night). This will help you stay focused on a specific set of goals, until those goals are achieved and replaced with new ones. When you begin each day with the clarity of your most important priority, you can identify specific action steps to take that day that will move you closer to the achievement of your goal. Any tasks that do not have direct impact your progress towards that goal should be second priority.
2. Proactively seek new ideas and inspiration
Successful lifestyle entrepreneurs are constantly seeking new ideas to grow their business. They regularly consume content that educates them and also inspires them to strive for new heights. With thousands of books, blogs, and podcasts available today, there is definitely not a shortage of content to consume.
Make it a habit to consume new content on a daily basis. Read books (or listen to audio books), subscribe to podcasts, and bookmark the top blogs or news sources in your industry for easy reference. Exposing yourself to new ideas and insights from other successful entrepreneurs will help you to stay on top of trends in your industry and learn new strategies to help grow your business.
3. Maintain high levels of energy
Unless you’re already at a point where you can run your business working only a few hours per week, you are likely working long hours, evenings, and weekends to build your business. This is perfectly normal during the initial growth stage of your business, and all entrepreneurs have to go through it. There just isn’t a substitute for hard work (if you find one, let us know!).
That being said, in order to avoid exhaustion or burn-out, you’ll need to take care of your physical health. Your physical health has a direct impact on your energy levels, and your energy levels have a direct impact on your creativity, focus, motivation and productivity.
Make sure you are exercising regularly, staying hydrated throughout the day, and eating as much healthy food as possible. If you spend most of your time working from a computer, take short breaks every 60-90 minutes, drink some water, stretch, or go for a walk. You can’t expect to be a high performing entrepreneur if you consistently have low levels of energy.
4. Commit to high standards and integrity
In the online world, a lot of entrepreneurs come and go. The barriers to entry to entrepreneurship are so low that practically anyone with a laptop can start to make money by selling products or services online. It also isn’t very hard to position yourself as an expert, which unfortunately means that a lot of self-proclaimed gurus are making money by selling mediocre advice.
The entrepreneurs who succeed long-term are the ones who actually care about providing value to their customers. They hold themselves to higher standards. They have integrity. They spend their time building a sustainable business. They don’t blindly seize every opportunity that has the potential to make money. Make a commitment to maintain high standards of professional in everything that you do, and over time you earn a reputation as someone who can be trusted.
5. Focus on income-producing activities
There are many tasks involved in running a business, but not all of them are considered income-producing. A task that is income-producing has a direct impact on revenue for your business. Examples of income-producing activities include creating a product, promoting an offer to your list of subscribers, consulting with a client, and hosting a webinar with an offer at the end.
Successful lifestyle entrepreneurs spend the majority of their time on income-producing activities. Other tasks that are essential to running their business, but that do not have a direct impact on their income are delegated to someone else (hiring a virtual assistant is a great way to offload some of your non-income-producing tasks). Tasks such as graphic design, accounting, editing, formatting, transcribing, are all great examples of time-consuming tasks that, although necessary, are not directly responsibility for bringing in more revenue. If you’re still handling these types of task yourself, do yourself a favor and hire someone to handle them for you.
6. Establish a morning routine
The first few hours of your day are very precious. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs begin their day in a state of reaction. From the moment they wake up, they are reacting to the needs of everyone around them (responding to emails on your phone before you even get out of bed is a perfect example Consequently, they soon find themselves caught up in catering to everyone else’s needs, neglecting their own in the process.
To set yourself up for success each day, you need to proactively design a specific morning routine that enables you to take care of your priorities before you attempt to take care of anyone else’s. The most successful lifestyle entrepreneurs all have a specific morning routine that puts them into a peak state before their work day begins. This morning routine is usually made up of a combination of hydration, exercise or meditation, personal development (reading a book, listening to a podcast, etc.), expressing gratitude, and writing down their top goals/priorities for the day.
A morning routine might take 30-60 minutes to complete (wake up a little earlier if you have to), but the effect it will have on your productivity throughout the rest of your day will likely be profound. If you want to learn how to create your own morning routine, there is great book by Hal Elrod called The Morning Miracle which discusses this topic in more detail.
7. Stay focused
Another key habit of successful lifestyle entrepreneurs is their ability to focus on what is most important to their business. This is easier said than done, which is why having someone hold you accountable to your goals can be so effective. You are less likely to give up on your goals when someone else is holding you accountable to them than you are when no one else even knows what your goals are.
If you aren’t already, consider working with a coach – someone that you can communicate with regularly and who helps keep you on track. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs in world all have coaches to help them with various aspects of their lives and/or businesses.
Another option is to join a mastermind group. With a mastermind group, you don’t get the 1-on-1 attention that you would get from having a coach, but you do get to share your goals and bounce ideas off of multiple people all at once. There is also more of a team spirit within a mastermind group, which you may find beneficial.
A third option is to simply find an accountability partner. An accountability partner is someone who commits to checking in with your regularly to make sure you are doing what needs to be done to achieve your goals, and you do the same for them in exchange. Some entrepreneurs utilize all three of these methods simultaneously to help hold them accountable and stay focused on their goals.
8. Track your key metrics
In every business, there are always specific metrics that should be tracked and monitored regularly. As a lifestyle entrepreneur, you should know which metrics are most important to your specific business, and have the systems and tools in place to track those metrics. There are many programs and tools that can help you with this (such as Google Analytics, for tracking website or mobile app statistics), but you should also consider creating a customized report (Microsoft Excel is a great program for this) so that all the data that is most important to you can be inputted into one document and sent to you on a regularly basis. This is a great task to give to a virtual assistant.
Other metrics of an online business include sales page conversion rates, email list stats (number of subscribers, open rates, click through rates, etc.) and social media stats (number of followers, likes, shares, re-tweets, etc.). Tracking these key metrics will help you to understand growth trends, predict future revenues, and make important decisions for your business.
9. Commit to constant and never-ending improvement
The final habit that highly productive lifestyle entrepreneurs have in common is their commitment to constant and never ending improvement. This is especially important in the world of online business, where we experience technological changes and advances on a daily basis. New programs, software, tools, and platforms are being created all the time, which is why it is so important to constantly be testing new tactics and strategies to grow your business.
Many businesses have died because they failed to adapt to changes in their industry and/or marketplace. And while it may not be possible to predict which changes lie ahead, it is wise to anticipate change and be prepared to pivot whenever necessary to ensure the continued growth of your business. Stay true to your vision, but never stop innovating and be prepared to change your strategy whenever necessary.
Habits can make or break your success
Well there you have it! We’ve just shared 9 specific habits with you that the most productive and successful lifestyle entrepreneurs have in common. These are the habits that, when implemented consistently, can help to make your success inevitable. Can you think of any other habits that play an important role in an entrepreneur’s success? Feel free to share them in the comments below!
Source: lifestylebusinessmag.com