Good Business Basics are the Key to Success

One of my biggest struggles in business is doing the basics well. I’m not talking about the basics such as managing people effectively, making sure the business is making money, etc.. I’m talking about the repetitive basic tasks unique to each genre of business that are necessary for it to be very successful.

For example:

• In a Software Sales job: Sending 50 emails a day to prospective clients
• As a Restaurant Manager: Be at the restaurant as much as possible interacting with employees and customers.
• In a Retail business: Reviewing weekly sales reports to keep up with which products are performing.
• As a General Manager: Regularly catching up with the people you manage to build a stronger rapport.
• In an Online Retail Business: Responding to all customer emails at least daily.

These are all extremely simple tasks that take almost no brain power to accomplish, but they can have a profound impact on your business. These are of course just general examples, and they vary from business to business, but the point is that each business has boring, repetitive, not challenging, sometimes soul crushing, basics that needs to be done. 

For someone like me, who has always enjoyed the creative side of business, I used to struggle to make sure I was doing the basics necessary for my businesses on a regular basis.  Whether it’s creating a new company, product, or even a marketing plan, I just like to creating something new. I can work until 2am happy as can be or leap out of bed at 4am ready to work, as long as it’s something new that I enjoy. But when it comes to doing the tedious basics, it can feel like watching paint dry.

So faced with the options of either letting my businesses fail or finding a solution, I found one, and it too is extremely simple. 

Schedule them!

The only way I’ve found to ensure my basics get done is to schedule them.  Whether I need to do it daily, weekly, or monthly, I put it on a schedule and MAKE SURE I STICK TO IT!  It can be hard at first, but it sinks in over time and becomes a routine.

Once you identify what the basics of your business are, I can’t stress enough that you should make a schedule immediately.  It’s easy to get stuck in the trap of “I’ll do it later.”

So….there’s no time like the present.  What basics can make your life or business better?

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