Business Growth Insights

The way you handle obstacles in business and in life could be the difference between success and failure. Having an efficient way to tackle the problem and find a workable solution quickly and easily makes facing those challenges much less intimidating and overwhelming. One of the best problem solving tools you can use is creating a simple visual picture of your thought process.

Business leaders and management trainers have given this process several names. Whether it is called mind mapping, brainstorming, critical thinking or creative thinking, it is the same fundamental process. Creating a visual map of your problem solving process is unique to your and your business. Here are 5 tips on getting the most out of your visual map:

Organization
Putting your thoughts down in a systematized fashion will help you organize random thoughts into meaningful patterns. Use a large clean surface such as a whiteboard, flip chart, chalkboard or just a large piece of paper. Not only do you want to have room to write down all your thoughts, but you also want to be able to add to your map to the drawing board. Once you have written your problem in the center of the page, simply start writing every solution you can think of relating to that problem. You can write the ideas in any fashion you wish as long as they connect to the central issue.

Key Ideas
Once you have written down all potential ideas in the first step, study what you have written and look for the key words that most relate to the problem solving path you want to explore. Highlight these phrases.

Association
Now you want to focus on your key words and phrases and write down more ideas that you associate with them. Draw lines connecting the new ideas to the key words you have associated them with. Each time you associate a key word with a new idea, a door is opened to even more possibilities. Continue connecting ideas until you can no longer think of anything further.

Grouping
Looking at your diagram now, you should begin to see idea words and phrases that naturally go together. Draw a colored circle around these similar ideas and group them together. Once your ideas are grouped together you will be able to see where most of your information is leading you and should help you determine a path to follow. You will be able to pinpoint areas that need further research or more information.

Action
The simple task of writing your thoughts down creates a starting point for your problem solving process. The visual diagram you have created from random thoughts and ideas can now provide you with a way to see where your attention needs to be focused and what your best course of action should be. Rather than acting on impulse or just barging ahead without thought, you will be approaching your problem with an organized plan of action.

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What if you knew that you can do so much more with your business, but you didn’t know where to begin? For most business owners, it can be a very daunting task to find the right path and stick with it.

Adam Armbruster was looking for opportunities to grow his business. Once he found OneCoach, he took action. He realized that the old model of business, sales, and calling more customers sometimes isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. He changed his way of thinking and applied the strategies taught by OneCoach.  Here is the rest of Adam’s story.

Adam Armbruster is a partner of Eckstein, Summers, Armbruster & Company, a retail advertising and media sales consultant business in Redbank, New Jersey, where local businesses experience their high performance advertising. For more information on Eckstein, Summers, Armbruster & Company, you can visit www.ESACompany.com.

Problem

The business wasn’t at the level he thought it could be. He was pushing himself to work harder everyday, but he wasn’t seeing any growth.

Some of the challenges he faced:

• Wanted to do more with his business, but didn’t know how to do more
• Tried to force what he wanted to happen

Solution

Since becoming a OneCoach client, Adam has seen incredible growth. Despite the recession, Adam has:

• Experienced a 30% increase in growth after the first year with OneCoach
• Experienced a 40% increase in growth after the second year with OneCoach—doubled his results in 24 months

How OneCoach helped

“I have a bigger sense of opportunity now. I really enjoy the recorded calls with the OneCoach experts, who I like to call “super achievers.” I’ve learned so much from them. There is no other place where you can sit down and listen to a conversation between millionaires and billionaires talking about how to become one. It’s information that you can’t find anywhere else,” said Adam.

The “aha” moment

“The thing that hit me between the eyes is John Assaraf’s philosophy, which I practice now. It’s about controlling your surroundings. I don’t let the world set my mood for me in the morning. I’ve learned a deep sense of gratitude for everything in life including the little things and have been building a list in the morning. The momentum of controlling your mindset was huge for me,” said Adam.

Why OneCoach?

“The content is authentic and it’s relevant in the real world. There is no fluff. You can’t get this info anywhere else. I’m in sales and marketing and John is the only one who can teach me,” said Adam. “There are others out there, but it’s all about zen stuff and you don’t really learn anything. Feeling good is great, but you also need to learn. I’m completely turned around times 10.”

Learn more about what we do at OneCoach…check out these 7 FREE videos!

A guy I used to work with drove me crazy. It seemed that every time I asked him whether he had taken care of something I had asked him to do, he would say, “I don’t have the time. I can’t do it.” This baffled me since I saw him take long lunches, leisurely surf the internet, clown around with other employees and even take time out of his day to run personal errands. Yes, he was busy all right, but he wasn’t productive.

Gandhi said, “Action expresses priorities.” Don’t we all make time for those things that are most important to us? What my colleague was really telling me is that he didn’t see the importance of the task. Let me give you an example: As a working mom I put my kids in daycare. One day I got a call from the daycare telling me my daughter had fallen out of her highchair and bumped her head. I dropped everything I was doing to go pick her up. She turned out to be okay by the way, but I decided that I had to take control of my time and my priorities. I sat down with my calendar and cleared it out. There wasn’t anything more important in my life than my child. She was going to receive all of my time and attention.

Think of your business as your child. If it’s screaming for your attention and you say, “I just don’t have the time” then you are fooling yourself and hurting your business. At OneCoach, we recognize the importance of spending time wisely. We get our clients focused in on their highest impact and income-producing activities (HIPA). Maximizing your ability to focus in on those valuable activities will increase your revenue, your cash flow and your profit.

Juggling too many day-to-day tasks will force you to become reactive instead of proactive. Being reactive — putting out fires all day — long reduces the effectiveness of your performance and ultimately your bottom line. Stop trying to be a “one-horse show”, wearing so many hats that you will start to feel like what one of my clients told me recently… “one of those plate spinners at the carnival.” You can’t run a business by barely keeping everything together!

You may be so overwhelmed that you don’t know where to begin each day. Here’s how to eliminate all the time wasters and time bandits in your life and maximize your performance by focusing on the best use of your time.

Start by keeping track of your time.
You should be very, very clear on everything in your day that is taking up your time. Take a good hard look at all the activities you are doing, all your processes, procedures, and commitments. Are you a serial procrastinator? Do you spend time reading junk emails, daydreaming, making personal phone calls and surfing the web? Or are you on-task and laser-focused on your goals for the future? Accountants and attorneys usually bill by 15-minute increments. If they don’t track their time, if they aren’t performing activities that are billable, they don’t get paid. How are you spending your 15-minute increments of time? Wisely or foolishly?

Take a minute to figure out what your time is actually worth.
Divide your annual salary by 2080 (which is 52 weeks at 40 hours per week). This will give you an hourly rate for your time. For instance, if you are making $100,000 per year, your hourly rate is $48 per hour. Are you doing activities that could easily be delegated to someone at a much lower hourly rate? Are there some tasks that you should be eliminating, delegating, and outsourcing? Wouldn’t it be more productive to spend your time generating leads vs. doing menial work? Why not pay someone $10 per hour to run your personal errands so you can spend your time closing deals and generating more revenue?

Prioritize your activities by how much revenue they bring.
After you’ve looked at everything you are doing on a daily basis then pick out the activities that will bring you the most revenue. But keep your list short. What is the most valuable task on your list? Establish a ranking value for each task. Decide whether it is a first, second or third priority.

Organize your activities.
Remember the “touch it once” rule. If you touch it…take action. Don’t reread, revisit or re-file. The whole idea is to be efficient. Get your workspace under control. De-clutter and get rid of things that you don’t need. I use four paper trays each labeled as follows, “To Do, To Read, To Pay, To File.” This helps me keep things under control.

Plan ahead.
Before the end of the day, review your schedule and plan what you intend to accomplish the next day. I always pick the hardest task to accomplish first. That way everything else seems easy by comparison.

You have a clear choice. You can either stay in overwhelm or you can take control of your life. Remember, you are exchanging your life and your time for your business. Make sure that you choose the way you are investing your time as well.

If you need help with managing your day-to-day overwhelm, I recommend you check out OneCoach’s Business Momentum Club to learn proven strategies to growing your business.

Part of running and growing a small business includes having to deal with continuous challenges big and small: the printers don’t work, there was a delay in product shipment, you lose your best client, the leader of an entire division of the company resigned, you’re barely able to make payroll. The list can go on and on.

What differentiates the entrepreneurs that break through these challenges and capture success from the entrepreneurs who allow challenges to overwhelm them, cloud their mindset, and detrimentally impact their performance to lead their company?

The difference is the successful entrepreneurs have redefined their definition of what a challenge is. The successful entrepreneur embraces challenges and understands there is no escaping them in any business. A challenge shifts from a disastrous negative experience to a positive golden opportunity to receive feedback and iterate, make improvements and optimizations to systems, processes, products and services, management style, etc., to offer better service and more value to employees and clients.

Readjusting your definition of a challenge can significantly impact your company culture and create a relentless, persistent, and progressive environment for which challenges are the norm, and looked upon in a positive and constructive light.

Other tips to dealing with and breaking through challenges in business:

1) Stay focused on the “Why”

What is the deep-rooted reason for getting up everyday and doing what you do? What is your deep-rooted motivation? What are you really trying to accomplish and what is your personal reasoning behind that? Thinking about your “why” can empower and motivate you to persist, even through tough times.

2) Visualize the desired outcome

Painting a clear mental picture of your ideal outcome, like a beautiful work of art, can motivate and inspire you to overcome roadblocks in your business. You can also create a mental movie where you visualize yourself living in your accomplishments as if they were happening in present time. Visualization can also help keep you on target and focused on the positives.

3) Change the physiology to adjust the psychology

When challenges arise, if you feel any bit of stress or overwhelm, adjust your physiology – get up, take deep breaths, go for a walk outside, go to the gym, jump in the hot tub – do something immediately that will help create mental clarity and keep your mind from “thinking” yourself to death.

4) Ask a business coach or a mentor

If you are experiencing challenges in your business, there’s a great chance that somebody has helped those who have experienced these similar challenges before. Consult with a business coach who has helped grow a successful business and ask them how they helped their clients overcome their challenges and roadblocks.

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Almost every person alive procrastinates at one time or another; it’s human nature. But for some people, procrastination can be extremely damaging to both their professional and personal well-being. In business particularly, procrastination can keep progress and success from ever happening. Our business consulting and business coaching experts often cite procrastination as one of the hardest obstacles for business owners to overcome. So why do we procrastinate, and how can we control it?

First let’s look at the why. Most of us procrastinate for two reasons; either we believe that the task at hand is too large for us to tackle, or it’s simply something we find unpleasant to do. You have to understand why you have a procrastination issue before you can figure out how to overcome it.

Here are some ways you can tame this time-sucking monster:

Shrink the task. When a task seems too large or overwhelming, it often helps to break it down into smaller pieces. There’s an old proverb that’s always good to remember. “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!” Sometimes once we’ve started on a small piece of the project, we build a momentum that takes over and we continue on to the finish.

Know it. Make sure you have all the information relevant to the task. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed because of the way something sounds to us, when in fact, it isn’t actually that way at all. For example, you feel overwhelmed if you think you have to take inventory and wait on customers at the same time, when in fact, extra help has been brought in to handle the customers so you can focus on getting the task completed.

Plan. Once you have all the information, draw up a plan of action for getting the task completed. This way you can see the steps you need to take and check them off to monitor your progress.

Set a goal. Some past procrastinators say that setting a deadline helps them to beat procrastination. Getting focused on the deadline drives them to complete the task.

Visualize. Some people are motivated to get the job done by visualizing all the benefits that will come from completing the project.

Grit your teeth. Try to do those things that you least like right away. Chances are you have to do them eventually anyway so why not get them done and out of the way.

Reward yourself. Promise yourself some type of reward for completing the project. For a large project, write breaks into your plan and give yourself something special each time you reach one of those breaks.

Understand consequences. Identify the disadvantages of not completing the task at hand and ask yourself if you are willing to live with them.

The first real step in conquering procrastination is recognizing it as a part of your personality. Try to determine what your procrastination triggers are and work to avoid them. It will undoubtedly take effort to change a habit as strong as procrastination can be, but stay determined! Your life will be all the better for it!

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