Entrepreneurial success requires consistency. Consistency is the key to performance, which can help or hinder you from reaching your business goals. Working with a consistent focus on a goal or objective can change attitudes towards your tasks, activities and your opinion of yourself.
“Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.” – Dwayne Johnson, American Actor
Consistency is important in business success and entrepreneurial achievement. Simply doing the work over a long period might do more for your small business when you follow Walt Disney’s approach and “...keep moving forward…”.
With consistent forward motion you will inevitably find yourself in a different place than before you started.
Check out the 6 step process, below to help you reach your consistency goals.
1. Consistency needs time to bear fruit
There is another phrase that rings true when people think of consistency, but it might not be the first thing that might pop into your head.
“...all things come to those who wait…” - Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie (1843-1905), Writer and Poet
You might want something so badly that you can taste it, but consistency will not bring you instant rewards. The way you benefit from consistency is continuing to work on your mission over long periods of time.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound glamorous. There is unlikely to be anything tangible for your non-entrepreneurial social circle to admire. However, consistently working on your project when focused in the right direction will eventually provide results.
Sometimes it’s easy to overestimate what you could achieve in the short-term, but then mistakenly underestimate what you could achieve with the same effort over the long-term.
If you wanted to succeed in 12 months, but you missed your targets. However, if you knew you would be successful within 10 years of doing the work. Would you continue practising entrepreneurial consistency until success? If the answer is yes, you need to increase your time horizons and concentrate on the work rather than the end result and objective.
The end result ensures you’re walking the right path and moving in the right direction, but trying to forecast when you will reach your objective is unhelpful and can lead to short term decisions, which could harm your long-term prospects.
2. Aiming for perfection is the enemy of business consistency
An almost certain way to prevent long-term success using a consistent approach, is to require perfection at every step of the way. If you focus on perfection you will raise additional obstacles in your path, which may prevent you from reaching your individual targets and your overall objective.
It’s unnecessary to add another barrier in your approach to success, as there is always a reason to delay something, restart a process or miss actions due to the end result not meeting unrealistically high expectations.
If you don’t have a rock solid business plan you can start your business with an outline and gradually move towards a goal in a particular direction. You don’t need the perfect business plan or the perfect action plan. Waiting for perfection will only delay starting and delay your feedback from real customers.
Delaying feedback is the way to kill your business faster than a vague business plan.
Likewise, if you don’t have a marketing budget, you can always find a way to communicate with your target customer on social media, websites, in-person meetups or forums. There is no need for you to craft the perfect marketing message. Your time will be better spent finding your customers and engaging with real people, which will help you build your network and customer relationships.
3. Procrastination will reduce your consistency
There are many reasons why entrepreneurs procrastinate. You will have moments where you help and entrepreneurial mindset strategies. Searching business forums, groups and discussions shows that many entrepreneurs may need help with motivation and procrastination.
Procrastinating entrepreneurs lose time and affect consistent performance, which means less time to complete tasks and more small business delays. This period will reduce your productivity, reduce your opportunity to learn from mistakes and reduce your business performance.
Procrastinating a handful of times is unlikely to affect your business. However, consistently stopping, starting or missing actions for long periods will eventually affect your businesses long-term success. Procrastination turns the power of consistency against you and can damage business performance.
4. Staggered goal setting can improve consistency
Setting goals and targets is part of business and entrepreneurship. Design your goals, so they build on each other like a staircase. This will help you to not only move forwards, but make steady improvements to your small business by building on previous work.
When you achieve a business goal or cross actions from your list. You open more business options. Each additional option would not have existed if you did not complete your previous action.
Therefore, consistent goal setting and goal completion forces you to think about not only your business objective, but the smaller tasks and activities needed to reach your entrepreneurial destination.
5. Consistent communication for customers and team
If you’re building something where customers will need to purchase, use or review. It’s useful and important for you to use consistent communication, so you can grow an audience, nurture relationships and [build a community](internal link: community pillar post) around your product, service or related experiences.
It’s easy to slip into the habit of designing and building a product or service away from customer feedback. Using a repetitive and consistent approach to customer communication and marketing means that the same entrepreneurial consistency can be applied to communication and messaging with your customers.
6. Without failure you cannot have consistent business success
Mistakes and failures are a necessary part of business. It’s unrealistic to think there can be any other way. It’s very rare for a business or side hustle to start from nothing without any missteps or self created issues along the way.
If you could predict the future, you could win the lottery or do something for quick returns. You might not decide to start a business and go through the ups and downs unless you love the process. The truth is that entrepreneurship using a consistent approach may not be 100% fun, but it will eventually provide the occasional backwards or sideways step.
That’s why consistency is very important for entrepreneurs. Mistakes and roadblocks are an inevitable part of creating something from nothing. It’s impossible to know exactly how your target market will react to your offer until it’s in front of them. Knowing how to conduct business research will help, but it’s never going to be the same as trying something in real life.
Failure can be an explanation for some of the consistency factors described above; such as waiting for something to be perfect or procrastinating about a task or activity. You may be concerned about failure and hope it doesn’t happen to you, but that would be an unwise hope.
The best solution is to anticipate failure and expect mistakes to happen. When failure happens, simply evaluate what happened, understand the problem or mistake and try again.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you acknowledge the dangers of short-term thinking, perfectionism, procrastination and inconsistent performance.
You might doubt your ability to succeed with a long-term business opportunity or side hustle. Simply start small, move slowly and consistently make progress towards your goals and business ambitions.
Mixing consistency with business focus and finding a business idea, which appeals to your customers. Provides a solid foundation to allow time, motivation and steady, consistent performance to increase your probability of long-term success.
Try to push forward no matter the problems. Given enough time, effort and consistency, you might look up one day to find your objective is much closer than you originally thought possible.
Good luck!
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