CAREER PURSUIT 2021

EXPERT ADVICE - SELF-EMPLOYMENT 44 SMALL THINGS THAT MAKE YOUR BUSINESS A BIG SUCCESS top waiting for the right time to begin a business. There isn’t one. Stop waiting for the best time to start a business in general. There isn’t one. Stop waiting for the best time to start investing. There isn’t one. I know this because I have been through the exact same thought process. Buying property, starting a business, and leaving security is a leap of faith. Every business has the same chassis. The game changes but the rules stay the same. In my experience, the business only ever grows to the level of the business owner. If you want to play at a higher level, you need to start with you. Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future. There are only a handful of traits successful people have. One is that they are utterly ruthless with their time. One successful millionaire told me he over-books his day consistently by 20%. Whenever someone tells me they have no time, my next question is always, how well do you plan your time? Never start a day until that’s done. What this means is plan every half an hour of tomorrow before you finish today. Billionaires go one step further and plan every five minutes of their day. Every single minute is planned and accounted for. It’s ok to have lunch but plan it. The next is they keep on learning, all the time. The great man Jim Rohn advocated reading a book a week. Bill Gates took this advice and became the richest man in the world. If you do that as an adult, how many thousands of books would you have read by the time you retire? What advantage would that give you over others?Warren Buffet reportedly spends five to six hours a day reading five different newspapers and combs through 500 pages of financial documents. Unsurprisingly, he recommends investors do the same. A young Elon Musk read for ten hours a day before becoming the CEO of Tesla. Where you will be in five years depends on the people you associate with, the books you read, and the action you take. If you want somewhere to start, a book that changed my life is Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. With any business, lead flow is fundamental. You cannot have a successful business when the leads aren’t coming in at a high rate. Most business owners I speak to have two or three lead generation strategies. However, for a growing business, you need at least ten. Breaking this down, you have ‘above-the-line marketing’ and ‘below-the-line marketing’. Above-the-line is everything direct, for example, sending out Business coach Gareth Hughes helps frustrated business owners put systems in place to ensure they can grow their business effectively. In this article, he shares some actionable advice to help you build a business that works. S By Gareth Hughes