What does it really take to hit six figures?

I can tell you one thing.  Well, actually three things—three traps—that prevent us from meeting this financial goal.

• We spread ourselves too thin. It’s exciting to see our business grow, but as we take on more projects, we often have trouble maintaining our practice of lavishing each one of our clients with the highest level of attention and service. This often happens to people in the “artisan” stage of business who are passionate about what they do and want to be involved in every aspect.

• We get stuck in reactive mode. With a hundred tiny tasks on our to-do lists each week, it’s easy to get bogged down.  When we concentrate on tasks that don’t move our business forward, we’re being “mechanics” for our business.  The mechanic never builds anything because she’s too busy fixing what’s broken.

• We don’t put our businesses first. It’s quite common to go through a phase where we treat everyone else’s business better than we treat our own.  We put our full attention to the businesses of our clients.  Our intentions of delivering an amazing experience are good, but we forget that treating our business with respect should come first.  We should focus on being the “principals” of our businesses instead of just serving as an assistant to others.

Want to stop yourself from being spread too thin, get out of reactive mode, and put your business first?

Four Questions to Hit Six Figures Faster

1.  Am I blocking time for strategic work?

If not, start holding weekly strategy sessions at the end of each week.

Here’s what you should be doing during these sessions:

• Review what was accomplished last week.
• Give yourself props for what you accomplished.
• Forgive your mishaps and sidesteps.
• Schedule your milestones for next week.

You can also use this time to steer clear of the “shiny new object” syndrome that can take you off track.

Evaluate whether following those shiny objects will get you closer or further away from your goals.

2. Am I blocking time for crucial routines that move my business forward?

Get into the habit of allocating a fixed amount of time to your tasks.

Parkinson’s Law tells us that tasks expand to fit the time allotted to them.

If you decide it’s going to take you a full day to write an article, it will take that much time.

Try this new technique of establishing a clear timeframe for everything you do.  I bet you’ll be surprised by how much more productive you are.

What’s most important here is that you schedule time for tasks crucial for achieving your goals.

Let’s say you guest posted on a site that generated a lot of traffic to your site and led to a handful of sales. You may want to consider pitching that site – or a site with a similar audience – another guest post.

In that case, you’d want to block off time for:

• Brainstorming guest post topics
• Writing a pitch email
• Writing the first draft
• Editing the article

Other ideas could be:

• Analyzing and optimizing your sales pages
• Recording a video that will more effectively describe your product or service
• Creating an editorial calendar for your upcoming product launch

3.  Am I blocking time to analyze and optimize the routines I am doing?

Look at the steps you are taking to get something done.

Are you being consistent when you perform a specific activity?  How would you explain performing this activity to someone else?

Creating structures around key activities of your business is going to propel you forward because you’ll be able to scale your business.  It will also save you a lot of the time in the long run because you’ll be able to easily explain how you do it and then have someone else do those steps for you.

Start your system optimization process by creating a checklist of how something is done.  Hate checklists?  Write the steps on post-it notes and arrange them on a flat surface.  See if you can automate any part of the process or do something more efficiently by taking fewer steps.  Record the new optimized line-up of steps.

For visual activities, record your screen and talk through what you’re doing.  Share the video with your assistant, have them create the step-by-step guide, and test it to make sure that no step was forgotten.  Keep the communication lines open and invite your assistant to suggest more optimal ways of doing something.  Often times it takes an outsider (and maybe somebody more skilled than us) to suggest a better way.

4.  Am I helping my assistant be even more effective?

Give your assistant ownership over her tasks.   Don’t treat her as someone who is there to merely do the tasks on her to-do list.

Have your assistant send you the list of tasks she’s doing for you.

If you’re happy with how those tasks are performed, have her record those procedures in a checklist or more detailed document.

If you’ve been unhappy with the outcome of a particular task, now is your chance to help your assistant turn things around.  Evaluate what is and isn’t working.

Sometimes giving clearer instructions or providing examples of how something is supposed to be done will resolve the issue.

Ask your assistant what tasks she really enjoys doing and which tasks makes her drag her feet.

Find out what’s going on.  Maybe she lacks certain training and you have an online program in your library that could help her.  Maybe this kind of task just isn’t one of her natural strengths.  Replacing that responsibility with one that lets her shine would be a better use of your money.

These steps will make systems so much more enjoyable for you and for your assistant because then she’ll perform to your expectation and you’ll be able to focus on what’s important – growing your business.

Back to You

I know this sounds like a lot of work…and it is, but you don’t have to make an overnight transformation.

You can hit the coveted 6-figure mark faster by just setting aside an extra hour or two every week, but you’ve got to use this time wisely—the way a successful CEO would.

Which of the four questions are most important for you to answer right now?