Launching your startup business is a time of tremendous excitement.
You rent an office space, purchase all the equipment/technology you may (or may not) need, and you start working on your first product.
You’re the happiest most driven person you’ve been in a while and everything feels right for once. You’re in a go mode and it seems like no power is this world can stop you from reaching your goals.
However, 2 – 3 months into the business and as your endorphin levels (the feel good hormone) return to their normal balance and stabilize, your euphoric excitement will slowly begin to decrease. You get up one day and you don’t have that same drive to put in the extra hours. You being to feel you should wait a little bit and see how things go. In other words, you’re not as motivated to work on your business today as you were 3 months ago.
Many other reasons contribute to the decrease in excitement. For example, the product launch didn’t go as well as you thought it would. The sales process wasn’t as effective as you hoped it would be. And you begin to doubt and question your business and its likelihood of success. Even worse, instead of working on it every day, you start working on it once a week and eventually once a month until you decide to close down your operation and do something else.
But why does that happen?
I believe that business is a matter of psychology and personal motivation. I believe startups tend to fail, among many reasons, when the business is no longer personal enough to the person behind it.
Let me explain.
1. Is Your Business Personal Enough?
Launching a business is relatively easy, but following through is really, really hard.
Working every day to grow your business, to reach more people, and to market your brand is not going to be all pink and flowery. It takes guts, sweat and tears to push yourself and your business to the next level.
This means making phone calls with energy and enthusiasm even after you’ve been rejected time and again. It means sending personally tailored emails to potential customers and businesses even when no one has responded to the first 10 emails you sent, and persevering through it despite the initial disappointing data and feedback.
It also means following market changes obsessively and taking note of every opportunity to market your brand.
And you will do these things when the business is deeply personal to you.
And if it’s personal enough to you, then every missed opportunity to promote your business will and should cause you tremendous pain. You ought to feel disappointed and think very hard about why you missed these opportunities. What on earth are you doing?
When the business is personal, you don’t allow yourself to miss anything.
You don’t allow yourself to “forget” about making a special discount on holidays and certain weekends. Because if you don’t make a discount on your products or services during the holidays, especially if you’re a startup, then you’re voluntarily sending your customers to your competition. How can you be oblivious to the needs of the market? If you didn’t detect that you should advertise a special discount on holidays, then what are you doing at your business? What marketing strategies are you using then?
In fact, if you forgot or didn’t think about promoting your business, then you probably don’t care about it. It’s not personal enough to you. You’re like an employee that works at a franchise fast food restaurant. You could care less if more customers showed up. It’s not personal enough to you.
But if you want your business to succeed, you have to take each failure very, very personally.
2. The Psychology of Perseverance
- Self-commitment
In order to follow through on your business goals, you must be absolutely %100 committed to your business.
You have to be obsessed with it. Everything you see around you must remind your of your business or point to your business in some way. You must constantly think of ways to improve your sales process and your sales pitch. You must constantly think of ways to become more productive and more efficient. You must micro-manage every detail of it.
Moreover, self-commitment means that no matter how much rejection and discouragement you experience, none of it can stop you or slow you down. You must believe that your business will not exist without you. You are the business. You are the product and you’re fully invested in its success.
You have to give it everything you have AND more.
- Self-accountability
Sticking to your business goals (and habits for that matter) requires accountability. If the business is personal enough to you, as I mentioned above, then you will by default hold yourself accountable.
But you should also track whether or not you’re sticking to your daily/weekly/monthly business goals. In fact without tracking your goals and productivity, you might convince yourself that you’re doing everything you can and using your time as efficiently as possible when you’re really not. People do that all the time.
But I ask them: without a tracking mechanism, how can you determine that you’ve used your time effectively?
Without hard data and without numbers, your guess is as wild as anyone’s guess.
If you’ve been following my blog, then you’re probably aware that I am committed to writing every single day for 90 days in a row. My daily goal is to write at least 1000 words and I’ve been doing so every day for the past 57 days. But even though working on my goals is automatic at this point, I nevertheless keep track of my progress every day. And I do so because if I slip, I need to know where, how, when, and why, and what exactly I need to do to fix it.
Why do I do this?
Because it’s personal.
And because it’s personal, getting off track is not an option for me either.
I don’t believe in excuses. I don’t believe in hard times. And I don’t believe in failure.
I only believe in getting the job done.
I believe in results.
…How committed are you to your business?