The One Habit You Need to Be a Successful Entrepreneur

We have been told many times that consistency is the key to success, but no one really tells you how to be consistent. They just say do the same thing every day. I get bored doing the same thing every day without reason, or even worse, I lose interest.

A lot of people fail in business simply because they are never consistent with one thing for long enough to see it work. Consistency is so hard. Almost no activity that grows a business pays you on the day you do it. The work you do this week can lead to income 3 months from now.

I have found that developing the habit of measuring and tracking everything you do in your business is the easiest way to be consistent, and to consistently do the right things. I record every activity, every day, from income generating activities like my cold calls, to non-income generating activities that are critical to my performance, like how many hours I slept the night before. From the outside it looks like a lot of work, and it looks like I have a sad life. But once you have a system for it, it is easy to do.

As entrepreneurs we love the chase, but we need to slow down. Before I tracked anything in my life and my business, I was busy every single day and I could not have told you which part of what I did was making me money.

All I knew was that I worked hard and I was struggling to make serious money. And with that financial pressure, nothing I did ever lasted long enough to pay me. It is easy to try cold calling, get no meetings out of it, and decide it does not work for your business. You can post content for 6 weeks, get no clients, and go looking for the next thing. You can run ads, get 2 clients, and think you are wasting your money. Then you move on to something else after that, and so on.

Every one of those examples is a real strategy that works for real businesses. People, including myself, just drop them before they get a chance to work.

And every time you stop, you lose whatever momentum you built, so the next thing starts from nothing and has even further to travel before it can show you any result. Which makes that one easier to drop as well.

Entrepreneurs always think they have a strategy problem, so they keep hunting for the better tactic, because they think everyone doing well knows something they do not. It took me years to understand that I had a consistency problem, and that until I fixed it, no strategy was going to work for me or save my business.

Why entrepreneurs stop trying

My consistency problem came down to one thing. On the day I did the work, nothing happened that told me it had counted.

Think about going to the gym to lose weight or to put on muscle. On any single day you train, nothing measurable happens. You do not walk out with your dream body. But you sweat while you are there, and the next morning you ache a bit, and your mind takes it as progress. So you keep turning up until the real result arrives physically, months later.

Your business gives you no obvious signal of daily progress. The work you do can be doing exactly what it is supposed to do, and there is still nothing exciting in your day to tell you so.

You make your 50 cold calls on a Tuesday, get no booking, and the Tuesday ends exactly the way it started. You can see why losing interest in doing it again is easy. The pain of rejection is not something you want to go through again. Once part of you has decided the thing is not working and will not work, you will find a reason to stop, and you will believe that reason.

So the work you do has to pay you something on the day you do it. It cannot be the eventual result that is months away. It has to be something that tells you today counted.

Give the work you do meaning

That something is a record of what you actually did, and it only works if you decide in advance what counts. If you told yourself you are going to grow the business, there is nothing there to score, because it is so broad. If you decide that 50 cold calls is your daily target, or even 50 rejections, then by the end of each day you either made them or you did not, and it does not depend on whether anybody booked. That is the important part. The win has to be something you control completely and can improve on.

So define the wins in your business, and make it something you can only get by doing the work that actually matters.

Then write it down. Just keep a record of it. Research has shown that monitoring your progress towards a goal helps you reach it, and that the people who physically recorded what they did were measurably more likely to get there than the people who kept track in their heads. The effect was bigger again when at least one other person saw the record.

Writing down your business activity shows you your daily win even if nobody booked or signed up. You can still look at the record and see the payoff arriving on the day, and it is another step toward the money arriving.

Start small

So what do you actually record in your business? Everything I track falls into one of the 6 systems every business runs on: Personal, Sales, Lead Generation, Content, Marketing and Operations. Every activity I do belongs to one of them, so nothing I do floats around unclassified, and I can see at a glance which part of my business I have been working on and which part I have not touched in weeks.

I take my Personal systems most seriously. I track my sleep, what I eat, how much water I drink, whether I moved my body, and even what I learned that day. Sleep and water may look like they have nothing to do with your business, until you remember that the other 5 systems all run through you. If I have not slept properly, my performance is affected. Things like the cold calls still get made, but they get made badly, and make reaching your target number even harder.

It is easy to make the mistake of trying to track all 6 systems from the first day. Please do not do that. Start with no more than 3 things, and make them 3 things that genuinely matter to you and the business, because tracking something you do not really care about is just tracking for the sake of it.

My first few activities were all about maximising my income generation:

• I slept at the same time every night.
• I woke at the same time every morning, so my working hours were always consistent.
• I made sure all my working hours went to the work that actually grew the business, by recording the amount of income generating and non-income generating activities I was doing.

That was my whole system for a long while. Everything else I track now was added over years, one thing at a time, and each one had to earn its place.

Turning the record into a score

Once you have been recording for a while, the list gets long, and a long list on its own does not tell you how you are doing. So I turn mine into a single score, called my Business Health Score, and two rules are what make that score mean anything.

You find out what each activity is worth

What keeps me still tracking my activities now is knowing the direct impact on my revenue performance. I know what every activity in my business is actually worth.

I know which of the things I do bring money in, roughly how long each one takes to pay, and which of the things I had prioritised were doing nothing at all apart from making me busy.

That is why my days are simple now.

I did not sit there deciding whether it was the right thing to be doing, because the record had already told me it was, and cold calling is the job in my business that is easiest not to do.

The days you cannot work at that level

Some days I cannot work at that level. I have sickle cell, so my body decides my energy ceiling on any given day and there is nothing I can do about that. On those days the activity still happens, but at a lower level than I would like. If it is a cold calling day, I still make calls, just fewer of them. Good enough still counts, and it keeps the momentum going on the days it is easy to do nothing.

And some days I do nothing at all directly for the business, especially when my health does not permit it. I skip, the same as anyone else. When I do, the only thing that matters is getting back on it the day that I am well enough to. To ensure I do not lose momentum, I track my personal systems even more, and the things that will make sure I recover quicker become my benchmark.

There is research that backs up getting straight back on it. A group of researchers followed people building a new daily habit over 12 weeks, and missing a single day did no lasting damage to the habit at all. Going a whole week without it is a different matter.

So one missed day is survivable. A missed month is how you end up back where you started. The habit I am keeping alive is tracking, as that ensures consistency in everything I do.

The bottom line

So the one habit you need to be a successful entrepreneur is to measure and track everything you do in your business, so you consistently do the things that matter.

Everything here comes back to one thing. Most of the work that grows a business will not pay you on the day you do it, so you need something else that will. The record is a temporary payment, and it tells you the day counted before the money eventually tells you.

1. 01Start with 3 things that genuinely matter. Not 6 systems, and not everything at once. Three activities that you and the business actually care about, because tracking something you do not care about is just tracking for the sake of it.
2. 02Quantify what a win looks like. 50 cold calls, or even 50 rejections. It has to be something you control completely and can improve on, not whether anybody booked and not something as broad as growing the business.
3. 03Write down what you did. Physically record it. The people who kept a written record were measurably more likely to reach the goal than the ones who kept track in their heads, and more likely again when somebody else saw it.
4. 04Add to them slowly, over time. Everything else I track now was added over years, one thing at a time. Each new one has to earn its place before it goes on the list.
5. 05When you skip, get back on it. One missed day does no lasting damage. A whole week is a different matter, so the only thing that counts is starting again the day you are able to.

Do that and you stop waiting to feel motivated, and you stop hunting for the better strategy for your business, because you will finally be consistent long enough for the strategy you already have to work.

Everybody tells you that consistency is the key, but you will not stay consistent at something you cannot see.

Measure everything. That is how you actually stay consistent.