Have you ever wondered, why isn’t my brand growing, and although you hate to admit it, but occasionally you have got a little envious when you see other small brands making a bigger impact than you. In today’s episode, I’ll be sharing with you the three worst time wasting habits among small business owners. So that you can finally stop delaying your brand growth and save you massive amounts of time. Welcome to The BrandMade show-notes. Don’t have time to skim read? listen to this episode on Apple Podcast.
Does this sound far too familiar?
You’ve become hypersensitive, maybe even almost slightly obsessed with other small businesses on your social media page are doing. And after you’ve kind of I guess, stalked them, you at least have one envious passing thought about said business. Plus you find yourself murmuring subconsciously or under your breath something along the lines of Oh, I could never do that. No, not in a million years. And did you finish a task last week, but obviously, instead of hitting publish for the eyes you actually created it for you’re too busy redoing it over and over again, to obviously make sure that it’s perfect. So if any of that did resonate with you stick around today, because I’ll be sharing with you the three habits that stop you from growing your brand. I’ll also be revealing why we fall into these habits? What actions do you need to take to save time, and to keep you focused on growth?
Are You Over Consuming Other Small Businesses Content?
Who else hates wasting time, I’m not talking about how you spend your time after a workday cause that’s obviously your time, watch Netflix, walk the dog, read a book do whatever you want use that time however you see fit. What I’m specifically referring to is the hours, minutes, maybe even seconds and our work day. And the best perk also can be one of our biggest downfalls or weaknesses as a business owner is that we do have complete power over our daily schedules, we get to play God in a sense with our work day, the where we work, when how much time we do quickly realise the importance of a schedule because we are fully responsible for what gets done. And just as importantly, what doesn’t.
Having To Learn On The Job!
Therefore, let’s just admit that the novelty of it can and does wear off to a certain extent and can even leave us feeling a little stressed and anxious. I’m far from proud of this mistake, but I believe that it is very important for you all to know and be made aware of. So I’ll admit that I have wasted hours actually, probably hours upon hours, maybe weeks if you calculated it all together. But simply doing tasks on my to do lists I thought was valuable ticking the boxes and therefore kind of provides us with that feeling of accomplishment. However, distraction is everywhere. And early on in the process, I had to Google a lot of things to learn, essentially learn how to run a small online business learning steadily grew into a habit of over consumption of other businesses and their content started because I didn’t know how to run a business and needed to learn through people who had obviously more experience than me. This in this did obviously help actually, more than I could have probably got here if I hadn’t listened and learned from others who have gone before me. But I could have also saved a massive chunk of time.
Information FOMO ?
So why does this happen? It starts out innocent enough. You just need to learn how to do something within your business. So you sign up to a few newsletters, watch a few master cars. It’s no strange task, but then it can quickly and rapidly snowball into this regular interruption. You read a title of a blog post or swipe through an ID carousel posts and you’re you know you’ve been searching for anything specific to answer at this point. But it’s a bit like Pandora’s box. Once you’ve read the hook. Now you’re dying to know what’s inside. You need to know what’s inside, right. And I think this habit basically stems from fear, a fear of failure within our business. Therefore fear of missing out on something really important, some really important piece of information, I can almost feel like FOMO but with bigger stakes at risk, were kind of creating this fearfulness around not knowing something, what we are inclined to do. To combat this fear and the uncertainty of unknown within our businesses is to over control over prepare through absorbing extensive amounts of information and content. We do this sort of subconsciously to hopefully lessen the chances of being blindsided or maybe challenged later on in our businesses because, or basically, we use over learning as armour before we even know what type of battle we’re coming into.
New habits to help you stop over consuming other peoples content!
So what should we be aware of be doing instead, make sense why we can fall into a habit of overloading ourselves with information and other businesses content. Obviously, I don’t want you to come away from this and think I’m telling you not to prepare or learn anything ever, but to be aware about the value of information you’re reading and consuming, and that you’re using it and taking more action within your business and in your workday, then learning for a test that you’re never actually going to take, if you see what I mean, I, I also think another good metric to measure by is, are you producing more content and material for your brand than you are consuming of others? If the answer is no, this can be a valid reason why your brand isn’t making a bigger impact compared to others. And last, lastly, learning is essential with within growing your brand, especially if you were in my shoes and have very little private business logic, knowledge. However, there is a time and a place a way to stop over consumption and kind of doing it all the time is to set research days or blocks within a set time within my schedule to allow myself the opportunity to learn openly and more. So to find answers I needed to specific questions or issues I was struggling with at the time and also to note them down and safe place to refer back to when needed this stops the interruption of my work day with content.
Get It Done! And Say goodbye to your inner perfectionist
We’re now going to be discussing perfectionism. It’s really no secret that I’m a perfectionist at heart. This helps me with design, a keen eye and finite and attention to detail and all that but as a small brand trying to grow it can become this huge time waster. I found myself on numerous occasions redoing a task already completed, trying to go that extra mile every time to perfect it to change it to see if I can make it that bit better, even if it’s just 1%. And so if you can relate to this, you might have just earned the label of perfectionism. I can tell you the first step is identifying it.
Perfectionism Is just Procrastination In disguise!
But what is it really I guess? Well, I believe is really just another form of procrastination is rather a clever in disguise form of procrastination because perfectionism gives us this real illusion that we are working harder and doing the absolute best, and are blissfully unaware of, that whilst we’re working on said tasks that deep down we are procrastinating. It can easily eat away at all time with no trace have definitely fallen victim to my perfectionist ways. And a perfect example would be redesigning my brand my own brand on numerous of times trying to get it to this ideal standard of what I thought was perfect at that given time, but inevitably its stunted my brand growth. Like this podcast, I’ve written tones of scripts more times than I’d like to admit. But why does this start? And why do we find ourselves on this hamster wheel continuously redoing previous tasks and putting off clicking on the publish button or the launch button, it starts to grow from a place of doubt, doubt in our abilities, and our skills or really doubt in what we’re putting out there. I’m sure we’ve all experienced that feeling of it doesn’t. It’s not good enough yet. Therefore, we build fearful around letting anyone else see it because of judgement. So in order to lessen the chances of doubt and judgement we procrastinate and try and perfect it over and over to make sure that it’s good enough to be seen. However, waste time in the process, the longer we spend on it, the more comfortable and safe it feels to keep working on it. Because no one can judge a piece never seen and making something to your own standard perfect is like asking how long is a piece of string who knows how long it will take.
New actions to harness so you can stopping letting your inner perfectionist take over!
Perfectionism is not something I’ve been able to quit cold turkey but there are definitely things that you can do to monitor it. So if you struggle with what I’m saying and can recognise your redoing task over and over again, then this should definitely help. I think the first one is to remind yourself that done is better than perfect. To start redoing work you’ve already done. For example, if you have a blog, don’t keep redoing or trying to better that phone As blog posts, give yourself time to do a good job, but then publish it already. And instead, put that time and effort into making the next one better, and so on so forth, your posts will naturally get better. But you’ll also be able to keep moving forward, instead of holding yourself back with 10 unseen drafts of one blog post, this will stunt your brand growth. The next thing I do is get a rough idea on how long a specific task can take. So that you are more aware of the timeframe that you’re giving a project or something to do if you take if you start to take too long on it, you can, you can quickly realise and commit to a deadline, make sure it’s a realistic one. But this will stop you from wasting time and, and push you each week to keep moving forward and see brand growth. And once you start this momentum, I think it does quickly pick up and it’s kind of snowballs. So it’s better to keep publishing, even if it feels scary, and you don’t think it’s good enough. Yeah, I think you should start putting it out there and start getting feedback as well. And you’ll get better throughout time.
Do you have a dormant brand?
So how do we know if your brand is actually growing or just sitting dormant? And again, once again, the best place that you should probably be looking at is, what are you doing every day? Where are you putting your time into your brand is essentially what you’ll get out in the future. A brand should never be seen as finished, but rather in a constant state of movement and growth. So if you’ve got a brand, say, website, but you’re not really doing anything, day to day to push traffic there, then it’s possibly a dormant brand is sitting digitally there collecting dust. This is essentially the same as buying a plant and not watering it but expecting it to thrive and grow branches and leaves and other day. And in order for a brand to grow. We must really nurture it daily through our actions. And long term, we should see our effort and are and rewarded seeing brand growth.
Signs of a dormant brand
Why do brands become dormant, and I’ve experienced this first-hand, I think it can be really down to in decisiveness in what you want from your brand, and not creating concrete goals or objectives. So basically not really having a clear vision for the future. You and your brand need to be working together towards something. I spent a long time having a brand with a mission. But no real goals and goals provide us business owners with a clear direction to achieve a specific result or outcome. Our mission statement is to guide the actions and decisions we make within our brand. But we still do need goals. And if you’re not convinced that we need goals, let me put it this way. It’s kind of like playing football without a physical goal. So you’re just aimlessly kicking a ball up and down the pitch. No one knows your winning no one would know what’s the score is, you’re more likely to just fill your days with aimless tasks and not being able to really prioritise any of them.
Why business goals are key for brand growth!
Goals, essentially save us bags of time and keep us focused. Did you know that setting goals can increase the chances of you achieving them by 90%. Plus, actually taking the goal that you’ve thought of in your mind and putting in to pen to paper or to write them down, you are even 42% more likely to achieve them. Who doesn’t want those odds to be in their favour, I can definitely testify to the above statistics. Within my own brand. I didn’t have goals for the first couple of years, and I definitely did stunt my brand growth for a long time. And so if you feel like you’re sitting at your home desk with your laptop, and you’re not 100% sure what you should be doing, you’re feeling a little stuck in your brand, then this is definitely the moment to realise that you need to start setting some goals, goals that push us to work hard motivate us, they can also overwhelm and derail. So do make sure you create realistic goals to commit to no goals the same or equal.
Choosing the Right Goals for you and watch your brand growth
Each goal will require obviously a different set of to dues and tasks. So it’s important to remember that behind every achieved goal is a great plan. So instead of aimlessly starting your day by controlled by emails, or the first thing that pops up into your head, by preparing your day, the night before these daily tasks that you schedule should also be supporting obviously, a goal either that’s long term or short term, there is such a thing as creating misleading goals. So if you are creating if you decide to create a goal of having by the end of the year 1000 id followers, that is a specific goal, but is that really what you need? Is it follows that you need or what do you want them to actually do visit your website to make sales. Therefore maybe the goal of followers isn’t as accurate and you need something that actually He represents the angle you want, which could be increased traffic to your site by 30% and Instagram, getting 1000 followers could be a milestone within this or increasing that to push them there, but we need to make sure that you’re being specific. This brings me to my final point Make sure to break down your goals with milestones so you can start taking them off as you go. You can easily track and measure your brand growth daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly.
That’s a wrap!
So by now you’ve learnt the three most common time wasting habits, why we fall into these how these have a knock on effect and stump your brand growth. So remember, don’t let overconsumption of other businesses content get in the way of you putting what you’ve learned into action. Remember that perfect isn’t a wise one it’s all cracked up to be done is far more effective and impactful in the long run. Don’t let your brand become dormant, make sure you’ve got goals that you and your brand are striving towards daily. But overall, I hope you take away from this episode that your daily actions are really important. And where you focus your time attention determines the direction, speed and impact of your brand.
