See where things went wrong, what worked, what didn’t work. If something wasn’t profitable for you research why that may have been. Research how you lost money if you did and could you have made a better business decision. If you have lost money and time in 2009 don’t look at those losses as a failure. Instead use those experiences as educational lessons and try not to repeat those same mistakes going forward. Did you overspend in your marketing? Did you not market enough? Did you use the free resources available to you to minimize your advertising budget? Do you HAVE free resources available to you to minimize your marketing advertising budget?
Wasted time could be watching 4 hours of television a day, or reading funny jokes and tons of pointless emails a day. Find things that are wasting your precious time that could be used for more constructive purposes.
3 – If you find there are gaps in the day of white space I call it, perhaps there are areas that are not predefined or there are areas where you could not take so long in doing a certain task you can use those times to work on your business. If you treat your self-employed business as a true business and not just a fly by night hobby you will start to see results.
4 – Try this exercise. Pretend in your mind that you are not the boss of your home based business, that you are an employee of a large corporation and your boss only pays you based upon your efforts and the results you are getting. If that were the case would he or she be giving you a paycheck every week? Every month? It’s very easy for us to not take ourselves seriously in a home based business but what if you try that scenario I just mentioned. Do you think you would work harder so that your employer would pay you? Perhaps this is a good exercise to try for the coming year.
5 – Here is another mind exercise. If I were to tell you that in 30 days from reading this post I would pay you $1,000,000 if you lost 15 lbs but I would not give you any resources as to how to lose that weight not any diets, pills, exercise programs, nothing, do you think you would somehow find a way to lose that 15 lbs in order to get that $1,000,000? I thought so. Well of course I am not going to do that but why not try that same exercise in your brain with the business you are in? If you figure out how to achieve $1,000,000 in your business based on the pay structure, give yourself a realistic time frame that you feel you could obtain that dollar figure or ANY dollar figure for that matter and research methods you would need to utilize to get to that $1,000,000 figure. Do you think you could find a way to try to achieve this? I bet you would try very hard to. It’s a good analogy and will get your struggling business partners to focus and use that analogy to their advantage.
Laughter is indeed the best medicine Larry LOL
One thing I would try to add to getting organized is to add a little humor now and then to relieve tension.
O.K. Laura Let’s get our thinking caps on and see who comes up with the best answer to the question, ” Why is fishing better than sex?”
It’s not embarrassing to get caught fishing by yourself?