10 Good Habits Any Small Business Owner Should Adopt

Being a business owner means you wear a lot of hats. We’ve put together a list of habits to work on developing in order to see your business grow and make it through your task list each day. It sounds scary, but we promise it’s not.

Here are our 10 habits for all business owners to adopt:

Set Goals
In order to get where you’re going, you need to know where you’re headed. Set short and long term goals and write them down. If possible, create a visual way to track your progress to keep you motivated such as a whiteboard. Check in on your goals weekly, monthly or yearly to keep yourself heading in the right direction.

Social Media
It’s important to have a well maintained social media presence. Simply throwing a page up doesn’t count, you need to be posting regularly. Develop habits to post daily or weekly on one or two platforms to start. For more direction deciding where to focus your energy, take a look at our guide. Or if you’re feeling lost, schedule a consultation today, we can help!

Blogging
We’ve talked about it before, and we’re saying again because posting regular content to your website is crucial to your search engine optimization. In the world of marketing it’s important to share knowledge and tips in order to gain traffic and customers. (P.S. we can help with blogging too!

Email Newsletters
This one may take a bit more of your time, but it’s important to keep your current, former and future customers updated on your business. Share your recent blogs, new products, sales or a feature on a customer or vendor. Staying in front of people is key to new and repeat business.

Ask for Reviews
Make it a habit each week to spend time asking former customers for a review of your business. If you are in a service industry, ask for a review when a project is completed. If you sell products, send an email a week after a purchase asking for a review on the product and the experience. Not everyone will bite, but you’ll be able to gain a substantial number of online reviews. Here are a few more tips about getting reviews.

Respond
Seems simple enough, but in the stress of operating a business sometimes simple tasks get missed. Be sure to respond to emails from customers or clients in a timely manner, we recommend no more than 24 hours. Set aside time each week to email customers or clients who you may not have heard from for a while.

Track Cash Flow
Set a budget and stick to it. This means you will need to check on your accounts at least weekly to ensure everything is where it should be. If you aren’t comfortable with numbers, hire an accountant or bookkeeper to help you keep things on the right track.

Prioritize
At the start of each day sort through your email and make a list of what needs to be done immediately and what can wait. Merge this list with your running to-do list. If a project or task will take just a few minutes, go ahead and get it out of the way. Then focus on what is most important and organize from there. Here are a few more productivity tips.

Read
Read and learn as much as possible. Maintaining your status as an expert in your field requires you to stay up to date. Business books, industry specific books and blogs, podcasts and entrepreneur/start up material are all recommended reading (or listening).

Be Mentored
Seek out someone you look up to and ask them to mentor you on your business ownership journey. If you’re an experienced business owner, consider seeking out a younger business owner to guide you through changes in technology. If you’re younger, seek out a more experienced business owner to guide you through the ups and downs of business ownership.

These simple habits will help keep your business on track!

What other habits would you add to the list?

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