What are the 3 steps to make real progress in your small business?

It's frustrating to work very hard on your business and do many things to make progress but in the bottom line, feel that your business is stuck. You can avoid that feeling with the proper steps, still work hard but be happy with the results.

Understand what is your business bottom line

Sometimes we think we know what we want, but we understand it's not what we wanted after getting it. For example, if you are a fast-food booth owner and want to increase the net profit for you.

You can try to increase the number of customers and realize that you need more employees and a bigger booth in the mall to keep the service fast. After a while, you will find out that you have customers, but you make the same net profit.

You will only then understand that increasing the number of customers was not the bottom line for your business. The number of customers was a means to reach the true goal of increasing the net profit.

You can figure it out with trial and error, but also, you can invest a reasonable amount of time to think about it before going into the adventure of increasing the number of your customers. What is a couple of days of thinking compared to months of trial and error?

Focus on your business goal

You are already familiar with taking your smartphone to write a message to your friend and found yourself 30 minutes later still using the phone, yet you didn't send the message.

The same happens also regarding business tasks. We might tempt to do tasks that will not affect the business bottom line, we are spending time doing them, but it didn't change much in the end.

In the fast-food booth example, you want to increase your net profit, but a good friend came up with a cool idea to redesign the menu. It's a lot of fun for you, and the overall experience will be better, but it will not affect your net profit soon.

When doing any business-related tasks, think about whether it helps you with the business bottom line. If you find it tricky, you can use software like goalskeeper.io that helps focus on what is essential.

Track your progress and learn from the process

We already wrote about the importance of tracking your business goals. Even if you understand your natural business bottom line and focus on the right tasks, you need to track your progress.

The process of reaching your business goals is non-deterministic. Sometimes you are doing tasks with good potential to affect the business bottom line, but the results are not good. If you do not monitor your target, you can continue working on things that will not help you as you wanted.

To sum it up, first, you need to understand what you want to achieve, take the time to think about it, it will be the best use of your time, focus only on tasks that have the potential to affect that business bottom line, and track your progress.