We live in an instant gratification society. We know this. We hear this all the time. The TV that we watch is now all done on-demand. News moves faster than ever before. We have access to give and receive money electronically, instantly across the entire world, not just from financial organizations but from friends, clients, and vendors. We can order basically anything that we want and have it delivered within 24 hours, no matter how big that thing is, whether it’s cars, furniture, or just more dishwasher detergent.
This is completely different from how many of us grew up. Back then we would wait weeks and weeks to watch an episode of our favorite show or a movie that was being promoted. We had to wait until the next news broadcast to learn about breaking news, or wait for a check to arrive via mail to get paid. Today, though, I’ve used Zelle at a garage sale, and find myself completely annoyed when I am on Amazon and cannot get something the next day, or if I am on the internet and cannot get the answer to a question right away.
And yet one of the things that I continue to see happening over and over again is that small business owners are waiting to solve major problems that are making them crazy. Not only are they waiting, they are coming up with extremely logical sounding reasons for waiting to solve these major issues. So why, in a world where we are not used to waiting for anything anymore, are business owners willing to put their entire business on the line to wait until everything falls into place just right?
Procrastinating Versus Prioritizing Versus Waiting
There is a big difference between waiting to do something because you are procrastinating and because you are prioritizing what needs your attention first. You cannot do everything at once – and you should not even try – so you have to prioritize what gets your attention.
In my business, I have a list of initiatives that I want to get done. I do an annual planning session to figure this out, and then I continually review and update it quarterly, monthly, and weekly, depending on what is going on with the business. From there we make data driven decisions on what to prioritize and what initiatives should happen right away and which ones have to wait.
Procrastination is much different than data driven decisions. Procrastination is KNOWING you need to do something and then just simply not doing it, or not doing it until the last minute. Waiting to do something is another concept entirely, and it is different from procrastinating and certainly different from prioritizing.
Waiting means not doing something and coming up with extremely logical reasons for doing so. It is sneaky because it sounds because we have ourselves convinced we’re doing the right thing by not taking the new action, compared to procrastination which we know is going to cause us problems Waiting is harmful to us and our businesses because when we wait to solve problems, we are just prolonging our suffering.
What Are Business Owners Waiting to Do?
In my conversations with other business owners, there is a recurring theme in the things that they are waiting to implement in their businesses. These are the most common areas that I have heard entrepreneurs are waiting to make changes. They are also the areas in which I have seen the most growth in my own business because I did not wait to take action.
Hiring a Team
The number one place where I see people waiting to do something is when we talk about hiring a team. The most common story I hear is, “I have to wait until I get organized” even though hiring that team member will help them get organized.
The reality is that if you were already good at that version of being organized, you would already be doing it. And if it is not something you are good at doing, you probably should not be the one doing it. So by waiting to hire the team member, not only are you prolonging your suffering, it’s really not your best work to do.
At Conquer Your Business, organizing is not the work for me to do. I do it differently, and I’m good at creating my own version of it, but I am not good at it for the business as a whole. Creating the processes and structures for the business overall is not what I should be doing as CEO. Instead, the team (who is good at it) puts the structures in place, puts the organization in place, and then teaches me how to use my part of it. Then we tweak it if we have to, so that I can actually function.
In fact, when people ask me how I am able to grow my business so fast and so far, this is how I have done it. People who are good at things do those things and people who are not good at things don’t do those things, myself included.
The longer you wait to hire a team, the longer you are prolonging your suffering, it is that straightforward and simple. Organizing your business is just one example, you may have a different pain point where you are waiting to do something, like waiting to get your financial records caught up before hiring a bookkeeper, or working on getting some blogs posted before hiring a content writer. Hire the help to do what you are not good at doing yourself instead of waiting and causing yourself more suffering.
Creating Systems for Your Business
Creating systems is a major pain point for a lot of entrepreneurs, myself included. You’ve built your business one piece at a time as you gained clients, and now you are busy helping those clients. But the problem is that now the entire business and how you do things is all in your head, and you’ve hit your bandwidth on how many hours in the day you have to do things. Not being able to take on any more clients sounds like a good problem to have, except that in reality it puts a cap on your income.
One of the things that I hear from people who are waiting to get organized and implement systems is that they are too busy, so they are waiting until a time when they are less busy. But I can promise you, you will never be less busy as you are growing and scaling your business unless you take the time to get organized and create processes.
In my last job before becoming a business owner, we would have occasional training opportunities that we could attend. And there was this one woman in particular who would never go because she was just too busy to go to the training. I had bought into the story that she was too busy, and then my boss said something very interesting to me one day. He said, “she’s too busy to get better at doing her job.”
When you think about it like that with your business, it means that you are consciously choosing to not get better at running your own business. Saying that you are waiting because you are too busy to become a better business owner just lands differently when you look at it that way, especially when you realize that the only way to become less busy is to put better systems in place to streamline or automate some of your operations.
Upleveling Your Brand
Another example that I have heard from a lot of business owners is that they are waiting to uplevel their logo, their content, their social media, or their messaging. They are waiting to uplevel their website until they make more money. They are waiting to uplevel their social media until they are getting on more podcasts. They are waiting to change their messaging until they are working with a higher level client.
Remember, your brand is much more than just your visuals. Your brand is everything that you do that promotes your business. These business owners are waiting to uplevel their overall brand until they get bigger clients, when in reality an upleveled brand is what they need to have in order to get onto that playing field in order to obtain those bigger, more influential clients, to get on podcasts, and to make more money.
The solution to this is squarely in the category of what I learned when I first entered the corporate environment: dress for the job you want, not the job you have. We often think that we don’t have to look the part, play the part, or speak the part until we are in the role. But you won’t get the role unless you look the part, play the part, and speak the part. We know this consciously, but a lot of people get frustrated by this.
I myself am not a formal person. I’m a very casual person, I’m not fancy. I’m very sweary. I’m not any of the things that I used to think I had to be to play at that next level. But the truth of the matter is that it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do if the visuals, the cohesiveness, the messaging, and that first initial impression of your brand isn’t in place, you will never get the chance to prove how good you are. It may not seem fair, but people will pass right over you.
So, going back to my own self as an example, I am not fancy, but I am put together. You don’t have to be fancy to be upleveled. In fact, you don’t have to be anything you’re not in order to be upleveled, but you do have to be put together about it. You do have to be cohesive, you do have to be congruent, and you have to look like you have your ducks in a row with branding so that you get the opportunity to show the world how good you are at what you do. People will make first impressions very quickly, and if your band is not at the level you want to serve, you will never get to serve at that level.
It’s just like a show I used to watch, What Not to Wear, which was a makeover show. One person after another would go on the show and say that it should not matter what they were wearing. And it’s true, it should not matter. But it does. People make instant assumptions about you based on what they see, and if your overall brand isn’t what they instinctively feel can possibly solve their problem, they’ll move right past you.
We live in such an instant gratification, and a visual world that if your brand – including messaging, visuals, the emotional response you elicit from people – is not authentic, congruent, and consistent, people will make instant decisions about you and think that you are not good at what you do. You have to break through the image of what people see in order for them to hear you. The higher level clients come to you after you look the part, not before. They do not lift up your business, you lift up your business, and that is what attracts them.
How to Uplevel Your Approach and Stop Waiting
Our brand is an extension of us, especially starting out as solo entrepreneurs. Your business cannot outgrow you. There are ways that you can uplevel your approach to your business so that you can attract the business that you want instead of waiting until you have the business you want to make the changes.
The best place to start by paying attention to what you are telling yourself. Pay attention to the opportunities that you do not take and the problems that you do not solve. Where are you hearing yourself say that you need to wait. What are you telling yourself you need to be waiting for?
Remember, the only thing that happens when you wait is that you prolong your suffering. Right now with the economy the way it is, you are not only prolonging your suffering, you are risking losing everything by waiting. It is harder to do business now. You have to be better at being a business owner, because waiting can literally cost you your business right now.
When you hear yourself telling yourself that you are waiting to do something, you can catch yourself. Think about why you are waiting, and what action you need to be taking instead. And then, move forward and take action.
