Steven Covey has sold more than 20 million copies of his book ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’, so with an audience this large, he must have been onto something.
In business habits can either be the ‘make’ or ‘break’ or a business, unfortunately, it is often the latter.
Let me explain…
Kodak found this in 2012 when it went into bankruptcy, some 124 years after it was founded, the reason. They were in the habit of producing film when the world had already started using phones and digital cameras.
HMV did the same when they got stuck in the habit of selling CDs when the world was downloading music to their devices.
Borders, the bookstore, founded in 1971 with over 1,200 shops and 36,000 employees and over £64million in profits went into administration. All because they got stuck in the habit of selling books when the world was reading e-books or buying them from Amazon.
Clintons Card shops did the same in when they closed 1,100 shops because they were stuck in the habit of high street retail when the market was ordering online from Moonpig and Funky Pigeon (which I incidentally invented in 2003, an idea I did absolutely nothing about and one that has cost me £millions).
My point is that even big businesses get stuck with bad habits and can’t change.
But….
As a small business owner, your competitive advantage is your speed of foot and how rapidly you can change.
This is why you need just one good habit and to practice this each and every day.
That habit?
Planning….
I don’t mean business planning par se, or any other ‘woo woo’ thought leadership.
I mean real, focussed, targeted planning about what you can do to drive your business forwards more tomorrow than today.
THINKING TIME.
That is what you need, structured thinking time to figure out what is it that you can do today that will give you that 1% differentiation tomorrow.
Don’t spend time looking at what other successful entrepreneurs do, look at how they think.
Every single successful entrepreneur knows the secrets to success and if you study them as much as I do then you’ll know just how they think.
If you don’t then let me help you out a little.
Every single successful entrepreneur knows:
- Why they want to do the ‘thing’ that they do.
- That they should only take small daily steps towards that goal.
- They should evaluate how effective yesterdays steps are in getting them closer to their goal.
- That they need to learn from this reflective time and plan their next steps for today.
As a #mathlete, I’ve distilled this into a simple formula:
An++Ln+Rn=S
Your number of Actions + the amount you’ve Learnt about them + how often you Repeat them = Success.
It really is that simple.
This is the key to success, a habit.
A habit boiled down to a single formula
And the basis of our superduper secret, one so secret that a cunning fox would dress as a weasel to hide what they knew about it.
It’s all part of the plan…