Building A Business - Slow & Steady Wins The Race
Building a business can be an overwhelmingly daunting task, or it can be a simple series of small steps that you accomplish one at a time. And this is true no matter what business you are in. Learning to adopt a slow and steady wins the race mentality relieves so much of the mental pressure and hype that is prevalent in today's business world. You may get discouraged as you read this if you are still in the mindset that if you keep looking you will find the “holy grail” of money making ideas and will succeed in making $50,000 next week. Maybe you will do that and maybe you will win the lottery too, but I hope you don’t end up wishing you could go back and start over taking it slowly, step by step. Over time you will have so much more to show for your business building endeavors with the slow and steady method, instead of wasting time and energy running around in circles trying to make money and succeed fast! There are two fantastic entrepreneurs that influenced my thinking in this way, Ken Evoy from Site Build It (SBI), and Dennis Becker. The SBI mascot is actually a tortoise and Ken constantly preaches the mantra of tortoising it, sticking slowly and purposefully towards your goal of building a business, not running around all over the place, and stopping at every distraction like the foolish rabbit in Aesop’s fable. And then reading Dennis Becker’s classic ebook "5 Bucks A Day" with it’s elegantly simple formula of focusing on one project at a time that will earn you $5.00 a day, helped me to narrow my focus to work on one project each day or week for however long it took to complete that project and just continue to do so week after week, enjoyably, slowly and steadily!
$5.00 a day seems like a small pittance, but earning even your first dollar in your own business is a major hurdle, and if you do the math you will see that after 10 weeks of doing one 5 buck project a week you would be earning $1,500.00 a month. Need to check the math? One project earning $5.00 a day would equate to $150.00 a month. 10 completed projects times $150.00 equals $1,500.00 per month. That’s $1,500 of extra income in 10 weeks! Now a year has 52 weeks, and let’s say you take off a few weeks in the summer for vacation and a few more at Christmas. Then perhaps you need to take some time for a family crisis or to get over that nasty flu bug you caught. So conservatively even if you ended taking up 12 weeks off you would still theoretically be able to complete 40 projects in a year taking the slow and steady approach. So let’s do the math again, $5.00 x 30 days per month = $150.00. $150.00 x 40 projects equals = $6,000 per month or $72,000 per year. Not the millions you hoped for in one year’s time? Well most people would give their right arm to earn $72,000 per year, taking 12 weeks off and doing it from the comfort of their own home. And once you learn to do this, there is no limit to how many projects you can complete. Perhaps you get so good at it that you can do more than one a week. Plus there’s always a new year to start and 40 new projects to add, so perhaps you double your income if all your projects continue to produce income indefinitely. You also get to put your eggs in lots of different baskets, giving yourself multiple income producing streams so if one project starts to fizzle out you have others still bringing in income and you’ll soon be completing a new project to replace it. And you learn bits and pieces of business building for your specific business idea each week. After a while understanding things that may seem like Greek to you now will be easy to do and you get more even more productive. So what would constitute a weekly project? That would depend on how much time you have to devote to building your business. If you work full time and can only put in a couple hours a day on your business perhaps you would build one or two pages for your website or create an educational brochure for your
service business.
If you analyze whatever business idea you are working on, regardless of whether it’s internet related or not, you can find an endless variety of projects you can work on. Perhaps you want to establish 3 new business clients in a week, or want to list 25 items for your
eBay business.
And by narrowing your focus to just one project at a time you avoid getting overwhelmed and distracted and also enjoy the immense satisfaction of actually completing something! Completion is a very powerful force, once you start to experience it, you will get more and more focused on experiencing it and it will catapult you into finishing projects. A project may also be part of a bigger long term project such as
building a business website.
Or it may be a group of smaller projects such as getting 10 inbound links a week. All these are much more attainable in small weekly project chunks than trying to work on 5 different projects in one week and finishing nothing.
Especially if you are feeling financially pressured in any way. Believe me I have been there. And even if it seems like the sky could fall in if you don't hurry up and make some money, it probably won't. And even if it does, if you just keep building slowly and steadily, in time you will have something to show for it. After awhile you have to decide if you are going to quit running around in circles and decide to trust, trust God, the universe, the process, yourself, whatever it takes. Then you can learn to let go and adopt a new focus of slow and steady progress toward your goal. Otherwise you will just hurry fast and get nowhere. Here is a great quote that illustrates this concept very well:
” If You Chase Two Rabbits, Both Will Escape”Return To Articles Page
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I hope this perspective helps you take a deep breath and step back if you have been feeling a bit overwhelmed and stressed about building a business.