How to create profitable habits

If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that growing a business is about what kind of person you are.

And what kind of person you are is determined by your habits.

Think about it - people say all the time that growing their business is a priority. But their habits are those of people who are still:

• Repeating their day-after-day routine and not jumping into action

• Flip-flop around on ideas, never sticking with anything long enough to reap the benefits

• Using cheap "get rich quick" tactics and complaining and giving up when they don’t work.

• Running away from the hard stuff, instead of showing up even when it’s difficult because the WINS are on the other side.
  

Here’s the thing, if you really want to grow your business during this tumultuous time, you need to start working on your habits, not just your strategies.

So I’ll help you get started.

Here are 3 core habits I’ve built over the years, and they’ve helped me grow 6-figure businesses.

Habit #1: The Habit of Leverage

Leverage is one of the first things I learned to rely on for success.

When I started my business over 35 years ago, I only had a few hundred bucks to my name, determination, and an eye for finding leverage.

That’s it.

What’s leverage?

The ability to discover what’s important to other people, so you can offer it to them in exchange for something that’s important to you.

It takes practice, but this is what every successful entrepreneur I know is good at. If all of my businesses crashed and burned today, the first thing I’d do is pick up a phone or walk into a room and find leverage. Period.

With my floral business, Bergerons, I created a whole community of people to connect, but I also realized that I had thousands of leverage opportunities at my disposal. Even though I was doing it, I didn't know why it was working for me, until I figured out that I had learned the art of leveraging.

The best entrepreneurs can find leverage in anything.

Action Step: Start looking for leverage in all of your interactions, you’ll see how many opportunities you’ve been missing. But they don’t mean anything without the next habit...

Habit #2: The Habit of Offering

Even as I got better at finding leverage, I realized at some point I still wasn’t making enough money. It turns out, finding leverage and offering it are two completely different habits.

Entrepreneurs do this all the time: see opportunities and still self-sabotage yourself out of taking advantage of them. THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME!

For me it was a confidence/money mindset thing that I don't mind talking about pretty openly, but for you it might be something different.

Regardless, if you’re not making consistent offers to your audience, you’re not getting sales. That’s where I was at, and I did one thing to fix it at my retail shop.

Have you ever heard it takes 21 days to build a habit?

Well, I did a challenge where I pitched an offer a day for 30 days. I was public about it too so it didn’t catch anyone off guard that I had a sudden 30 day streak of being sales-y, haha.

Surprisingly everyone cheered me on!

The point was to be active in monetizing the leverage I saw everywhere, and make at least $10 a day doing it. Pretty low bar huh?

Well it wasn’t easy. I just kept offering it every time someone came in my shop door! And that’s what built the habit. But even though that bar was set pretty low at $10, guess what happened?

That challenge brought me my highest grossing month at the time. Way more than I ever made in 30 days.

There was a clear difference in income potential simply from showing up and ASKING for the sale.

So do this for yourself: take action on the leverage you see around you instead of shying away from it.

Now, I don’t make offers every single day, but I still have to remind myself not to shy away from them anymore. That’s the point. Still, I can find myself stuck sometimes when I don't act on this next habit. I gives me my biggest breakthroughs yet….

Habit #3: The Habit of DOING LESS

The first two habits got me started in success, and they’ll get you to the $1/m and beyond mark. But the habit of doing less is the most important one for scaling past that point.

Doing less isn’t about being lazy in everything you do. But you do want to be lazy about things technology and a team can do for you.

At a certain point I got really serious about saying no, and the more I said no the more my businesses grew.

Think about it:

I couldn’t grow and manage two locations, create and design floral menageries, conduct daily deliveries, create a floral distribution hub and manage the logistics out of other countries, juggle hotel contracts, and manage to execute events for multiple clients all by myself.

It sounds insane just thinking about it, doesn’t it?

And the thing is, even my team couldn’t handle this stuff without automations, systems, and SOPs in place. It would be a nightmare (and honestly, sometimes it was until I created SOPs).

I have the same 24 hours in a day that you do. But I spend a lot of my time obsessing about how I can do less every day.

So my entire mentality has grown from doing everything myself to doing as little as possible of anything that doesn’t absolutely REQUIRE my attention.

And then I focus on making sure I’m doing the same in supporting my team. I don’t want to overwhelm them with work that technology can handle, or with decisions that a quick SOP can take off their plates.

For instance:

✅  If using project management systems, like Trello or Asana, will cut labor and help my team be more efficient, then sign me up!

✅  If using Calendly to schedule your appointments with your potential and current clients, so you can now focus on more stuff that drives growth and engagement, count me in!

✅  If a quick checklist or training video will give my team clarity on how I want something done, so they never have to guess at it or ask me again, OHHHHH yes! 

Why? Because doing less makes the extra room in a day for us to produce more.

The more technology does for my team, the more time my team has to do higher level things. And the more they can do, the more time I have to do the high-level stuff that only I can do for my businesses.

And that’s the truth for every business owner I know. It's the truth for you too.

This mentality has helped me level up my entire team, myself, and all of my businesses. And the more I work on optimizing these systems, the more we all win together.

Looking for support with the best automations and systems to adopt in your business? I support small businesses with developing strategies and systems to help them grow and become more profitable. Click here to book in a call with me to see if we could be a good fit.

Now, go build some habits!

(In full disclosure, some links that I share in my blogs are affiliate links, but not all of them. I really just want to share what works for me! I'm of the notion that if someone wants to give me props for recommending what I already love, then I'm all for it! But, if they don't, then it doesn't matter, because I'm still recommending them anyway!)