A Guide for Busy Entrepreneurs to Achieve Success

It seems like achieving small business success is almost an impossible feat considering how much an entrepreneur needs to consider. So how do elite entrepreneurs find the extra time to actually achieve success?

It’s crazy how entrepreneurs seem to achieve success again and again almost effortlessly. Meanwhile, you feel like there are only half the hours in the day you need to barely keep your head above water, much less have time to think up a ground breaking play that will concrete your spot at the top of your industry.

So what’s the key to success for busy entrepreneurs? Check out the following eight step guide:

1. Go to Bed Later

Most time management and success tips and books talk about the importance of getting up early. Ironically G-Code Magazine’s recent report on decoding the secrets of the most successful billionaires quotes research proves one of the four habits of the smartest includes going to bed later!

Obviously, this doesn’t mean burning yourself out. Like any intelligent bodybuilder knows; pushing yourself to hard can be counterproductive in the end. Sleep advocate, Arianna Huffington with the Huffington Post claims the solution is napping.

2. Time to Think

From Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs, it’s pretty clear that massive success isn’t reliant on the number of hours you put in working like a mad person, but rather the time you spend clocked out, thinking.

Most busy entrepreneurs could never comprehend taking an exorbitant amount of time off—if any at all—but you can carve out a weekend a month just to brainstorm or spend an hour a day practicing yoga at home or even in the office during your lunch break.

3. Productivity Apps

Your smartphones and tablets are gold, and can put thousands of productivity apps right at your fingertips. Use them!

4. Know When to Switch Your Device Off

If you are going on vacation, then actually vacation. Don’t feel obligated to return phone calls or emails after hours or on weekends and maybe you’ll help instill a trend that gives you more free time in the long run. At night make sure you literally unplug devices and banish your phone from the nightstand in order to get sound sleep when you do finally hit the sheets.

5. Use Call Forwarding, but…

Leveraging call forwarding for your business phone lines so that you never miss a call on the go and can stay mobile is great. Smarter entrepreneurs use call forwarding to send inbound calls to virtual assistant and call centers that provide 24/7 customer service for them. This frees you up to only work on the most important items while actually delivering far better customer service than 99% of your competitors.

6. Recognize there are Few Rewards for Sprinters

It’s important to recognize that achieving success is a marathon, not a sprint. There are times to pick up the pace, but greedy and short sighted sprints can sabotage the long game.

7. Focus on the Right Figures

The number one reason that entrepreneurs are so frazzled and time starved today is that they are completely focused on the wrong figures. They are allowing others (that are often not nearly as profitable as believed) to dictate their schedules. There are new metrics small business owners are told that they need to catch up on every day. Behind those metrics are often ridiculous numbers of hours of non-income producing work. Unit volume, online traffic, Facebook likes, and even revenues can all be an illusion which takes entrepreneurs further from where they really want to be. Always ask the impact on the bottom line and real net profits. If it doesn’t help, then it probably hurts.

8. Set the Right Goals and Share Them

Perhaps most importantly, one of the biggest differences in those that achieve the upper echelons of success and become ingrained in history books is that they have different goals. They aren’t just brainstorming where they can make the next quick buck the fastest. They are working on providing big solutions, often before most people really realize that there is a problem.

No one cared much about ‘needing’ electricity before it was invented. Space travel was likely thought a foolish venture by many even though you can rack in a quarter of a million a ticket to provide an extremely brief visit out of our atmosphere today. And who envisioned that individuals all over the planet would become inseparable from their iPhones?

So is it time for you to re-write your goals? In addition to reading, one of the ‘4 Habits of the Super-Smart’ is not just having written goals, but sharing them with friends for accountability too…