You are likely to have been running your trade business for a while. If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time thinking about the business you’re trying to build — looking forward.
Looking forward is a necessary part of taking your business where you want it — how can you head that way if you’re not looking that way?
We start by drawing a picture of the trade business you want to build — the size, your role, reputation, and what it’s like for you and the rest of your team. Then we make a plan for how were going to get from today to there.
This ‘future-focus’ is great and it’s necessary but it has a dangerous, negative effect. That goal we made can be quite far away (it depends on how ambitious you are — mine feels quite distant). When you’re doing something difficult or something didn’t go to plan or something came out of the blue and dealt you a stinging blow, and your goal is impossibly distant and unreachable, it can be very dispiriting.
Much of the literature and the psychology will tell you to break your goals down into sub-goals — nearer and more achievable, so they feel less distant, and you get a more immediate reward.
In my experience, that helps a bit — if you feel like you are making progress. But it doesn’t help much when you don’t. And let’s be honest, if you have an ambitious goal, there will be times like this. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
It gets worse if you look around you — on social media (of course), but in the real world too. Everywhere you look you see people doing better than you or people talking about things they’re doing that you aren’t.
So it’s easy to feel despondent about how far you still have to go.
And the solution is to pause and look back.
- Look how far you’ve come
- Look at what you’ve achieved and the progress you’ve made so far
- Tick off (or cross off) the things you’ve completed on your plan
- Measure revenue and profit and compare them to when you started
Think about how you feel — how stressed you feel or how hard you’re working compared to before, you’ll feel a lot better and it will give you a heap of strength.
Don’t compare your success with others
It’s worse, (isn’t it?) if you look around on social media and you see how much better everyone else seems to be doing, I certainly get that. There seem to be a million business coaches out there making loads more money than me, driving Ferraris, traveling around the world, having lovely holidays.
It’s important that I do this to myself and look back and see how I was a couple of years ago and where I am now and realised I’ve made progress and things are better. I’m not worrying too much about what those other guys are doing.
So in my experience, it helps an awful lot to do that progress check:
- Make a plan
- Write it down
- Tick things off
- Pause and look at your books and look at how much money you were making a year ago or two years ago
We do this a lot in my coaching programs. It’s an important part of helping you push through the top parts. We spend a lot of our time thinking about our plan and our goal and what needs to be done.
You don’t only have to be working with me though. You can:
- Measure revenue and profit every month and draw a graph and watch the line head upwards.
- Make a plan and tick things off.
But your lines will head up faster with me than without — that’s a promise. You probably know I’m a business coach for tradies. I help trade business owners grow and scale their business, so they make more money, have more time and build a cool, structured business they’re proud of.
Watch the full video here: https://www.smallfish.com.au/dont-look-back/
