Adam Stott is an entrepreneur, author, business coach and founder of Big Business Events.
Ezra Bailey
How do you stay focused and accountable for your results? I’m going to help you find the right mindset and give you some rules to live by to help you stay accountable to your business and its success. Focus and accountability are vital to your success because, without them, you and your team lack the motivation to reach your overall goal.
Success is the aggregate of many factors done again and again that together create a good result. Failure is the same thing but done in the wrong way. I like to use the phrase, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” because that's kind of the mentality you need to have for a long-term strategy.
Right now, what is it that is stopping you from creating the success and the wealth you want? What are the things you're doing wrong that are driving you toward failure? You are the driver, and you’re moving in one of two directions. You are either driving yourself toward more success or you are driving yourself toward failure. If you’re headed toward failure, I want you to turn the car around and start driving toward success, understanding that by creating your own momentum, you will achieve better results. You can do this in various ways, but here are the ones I recommend:
1. Stay focused on one project at a time.
Stop being a grasshopper. For a lot of people, success and wealth are limited by the fact they work on too many different projects, jumping from reed to reed like a grasshopper. Instead of finishing one project and moving to the next, they continually jump from one to the other. Because of this, they never create the wealth and success they want because they don't have laser focus. You need to be incredibly focused on getting the results you deserve and not jumping around so much that you can’t accomplish what you set out to do. If you're working on one project, finish it, and then move on to the next one.
2. Get your team equally focused.
In addition to the focus you put into a project, I want you to make sure that everyone else involved has the same laser focus you do. You might be the business owner, the driver of the operation and completely focused yourself, but you are only as good as the people around you. If your team is not completely focused, if the whole team isn’t driving in the right direction together, you're not going to get the result that you want and deserve. In order to get the rest of your team on board, you need to find a way to excite them about the end result. Let's say you want to increase your sales. Talk to your whole team about how the increased sales could increase their salaries. Get everyone involved: marketing, administration, finance — everyone.
3. Optimize your processes.
Another important way to stay focused is to never stop optimizing your business functions. Even when something has worked for you, like closing sales, you need to optimize it. By optimizing, I mean that you need to look at the nuts and bolts of what you’re looking to accomplish and improve it constantly. For example, your sales process might work perfectly well right now, but when was the last time you reviewed it? Can you generate leads at a lower cost? A great way to start the optimization process is to write down the key functions of your business, which will often be things like marketing, sales, finance and after-sales follow-up or maintenance. Choose one of the functions and workshop it with your team or on your own.
4. Never stop learning.
It’s important to be accountable by training yourself and your team at least on an annual basis, and quarterly at most. Things change fast, especially in a fast-growing business. Of course, you want more growth and a faster-growing business than you have right now. Think about what areas of your business are changing that you and your team could benefit from knowing more about. Maybe there’s a new online sales tool that can help you keep track of leads and customer interaction or a new book that includes valuable marketing techniques you’d like to start using. When you and your team are training, you are constantly learning new things, sharing what you already know and ultimately building a better and smarter business.
5. Stay motivated.
Keeping yourself and your team motivated and inspired is also critical. Find something that you can listen to, read or meditate on every day that will help you grow, that will push you forward and that will give you new ideas. It may be inspiring music, a podcast that makes you think differently or a mediation routine or app that helps you focus. Whatever it is, use it to keep your mind focused on creating more success.
6. Keep moving forward.
Finally, when you’ve had a terrible day, remember that tomorrow is a new day. You're going to go to sleep tonight, you're going to wake up tomorrow and you're going to be okay. Feeling bad about a deal you didn’t get or a new technique you tried that didn’t work won’t help you do better tomorrow. Even if yesterday was bad, you're going to battle on. If you can get that mentality, you are going to start to create better results.
I want you to think about three habits you currently have. These could be any number of habits that are holding you back, like watching too much TV, not learning enough about your business, spending too much time on social media, not being around the right people or not attending enough social or learning events that motivate and inspire you. I want you to change at least one of these habits. Once you have changed your behavior with that one habit, you’ll be on your way to more success.
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