Have you ever wondered how some people can sail through setting up a business and then continue to grow and scale that business without ending up with as much as a scar?

Then they end up either selling or putting in a manager to run that business while they follow another passion of theirs and duplicate that process? While others go from business to business, all the while carrying debt and wounds from one business to another?

I wasn’t born one of those humans that I described above that knew what it took to have a successful business the first time around.

However, I consider myself lucky to have emerged from my first business somewhat battered and bruised, but also stronger for the experience and not covered in scars.

However, there was enough pain from those bruises for me to discover where I could make changes for next time. I went about and changed my mindset, which in turn changed my behavior, quickly followed up by actions for my second business, the one I’m in now.

My changed mindset is one that allows me to be in the world of success daily.

Of course, there are always two sides to anything. In business, those two sides are the business owner’s mindset and the daily actions taken inside a business based upon strategies to make it profitable. Although I am equipped to discuss both sides, today we are focusing on the business owner’s success mindset.

There are three steps to set yourself up with and master your business success mindset intention, daily practices, and monitoring progress.

They don’t sound new or original, do they? However, what I have found that is when you perfect these three steps on a consistent basis, you will see your business success soar.

Throughout this article, I encourage you to be like a student, open to new learning, and aiming to think big. For if you had nothing to learn about having a business success mindset, you wouldn’t be reading this in the first place.

Intention

Some people call your intention your “why”. I like to think of intention like this: there is something not working, or not working as well as you would like it to work in the world.

As such, you have an immense passion to ensure that through your business offerings, whether it be a product or service, you would make a difference to that issue, so much so that you are touched, moved, and inspired to keep making that difference.

This issue that isn’t working or where there’s some kind of gap, which you are looking to alleviate through your business, should be something that you are really passionate about. If you didn’t get your business going, then you would have a sick feeling in your gut about this issue not working for others and knowing you could fix it or make a dent in it.

This is something that is much bigger than you and your survival. It would be so inspiring that it would pull you out of your warm bed on a cold winter morning so that you could start the day knowing that you were making a difference to someone or something in this area of your passions.

In the realm of real estate, this passionate drive often manifests in individuals who see not just properties, but potential homes, communities, and opportunities for transformation. A real estate business expert might find their “why” in revitalizing neighborhoods, providing affordable housing solutions, or innovating in sustainable development. Their commitment isn’t solely to the bottom line but to the very fabric of communities they serve.

For instance, those motivated by the challenges and opportunities in unique markets often find profound fulfillment in helping people relocate to places with vast potential, like Alaska. The pristine wilderness, burgeoning job opportunities, and the promise of a fresh start draw many to the Last Frontier. For anyone curious about such transformative moves, resources like exprealty.com/guides/10-reasons-people-are-moving-to-alaska/ provide valuable insights and guidance. These real estate professionals understand that every property they manage or sell is not just a transaction but a step towards building a better, more inspired community.

Your intention of what you are going to make better in the world is your context, and it is why you started your business in the first place. You may need to have a look at what that was. Is it still your passion?

Does it still inspire you to jump out of your warm bed on a cold and frosty morning? If not, then you might need to review, tweak, or even create a new intention that stirs something inside you. This would be based on something that you see you can fix with your business and something that people need.

Without this high-level intention based on something outside you, when the going gets tough in business, as it will, this will be the one thing that will keep you going. It will be the one thing that you know in your heart of hearts you can’t get rid of. It will be the one thing that you simply will not give up on.

To create your intention, you will not be thinking of results that could occur from the success of your business, like making $180,000 net for the year, buying the car and boat of your dreams, or just making enough to pay the bills.

Your intention should have nothing to do with what you can get and everything to do with what you can give, provide, and help with. Think about your intention in terms of what your customers will be receiving from you and your business. Then turn that into a statement that moves and inspires you into action every day.

For example, my first business was an accounting practice. In the first few years, when I was in survival mode, I never had an intention other than survival, which is what I find in most business owners in their first business. Being new to the world of business, every day there are new challenges to either jump over, duck, or step aside from.

My success, in terms of return on investment in time and money, was not apparent at that time. On reflection, what I learned from those first few years of challenges has been priceless, and it is all still with me today as I coach other coaches in businesses.

About halfway through my 15 years as a principal in an accounting practice, I created my intention that led the way for success with my mindset as well as a return on investment in time and money. That powerful intention was to exceed our clients’ expectations.

This intention gave me my purpose for those cold winter mornings. It had me eager to deliver not only what was expected of me as an accountant but to exceed my clients’ expectations, from the little things like knowing how they took their tea or coffee when they came into the office, to taking the time to understand what was going on in their world other than in the world of business in our conversations.

Let’s just say those two small changes, ones that didn’t cost anything started a snowball of mindset shifts within me, the team, and our business results. They were not the only two changes we made in the business. The other change was a radical one that separated me from most of the practitioners at the time.

This was to stop the process of time sheets, charging clients in six-minute units for any work we performed. Not only was this method old-fashioned, unproductive, and, in some cases, made up by the many people preparing the time sheets, it didn’t fit under the new intention “to exceed our clients’ expectations”.

Consider that if the senior partner of the firm had a junior doing the work with a charge-out rate that didn’t match the skills required to accomplish the job, the client either was over- or under-charged for the work.

It occurred to me that if you had a degree in accounting and had so many years of experience, you charged out at X, and if you had double those years of experience, you charged out at Y. Thus, the rate charged was not at all connected to the complexity of the job and the actual knowledge of the individual performing it that you’d think would make up the value of the work being done for the client.

Seeing as integrity was, and is, one of my highest values, I made a radical change for the better and in line with my new “intention”. This was the beginning of the shift in mindset of the business, team, and me. No longer were we measured by an hourly charge-out rate that someone had said was “normal” within that industry.

We were measured on performance of an individual job, based on the complexity and knowledge required to achieve the positive result. In turn, we started giving fixed prices, and from the engagement and communications we had with our clients, we knew exactly the complexity of the work as well as who was suitable to achieve the result for the client as well as exceed their expectations. This had the client know our expert status and worth as their accountant.

The other added benefit it had was our team members knew their own value and worth, and not as measured by an hourly rate and how much time they had to complete the job that may or may not have been commensurate with their level of skills and knowledge. In this way, a total mindset shift occurred across the business, so that we were able to fully take on exceeding our clients’ expectations each day and achieve business success.

If you are still wondering if your Intention is big enough to pull you into action even when you are up against the wall with nowhere to go, do some thinking on it once you finish this article. My rule of thumb is that if you do not get a “pang” in your stomach when you voice it out to a prospective customer, then it’s not big enough.

My current intention is—to reduce business failure rates worldwide. That still has me touched, moved, and inspired each time I voice it. I know I am well on my way with 14 coaches working with me on the same intention across the world, who each have over 10 clients on a regular basis and who are teaching a process that triples leads and doubles profits in the given businesses.

Let’s get to the second step in mastering your business success mindset.

Daily Practices

Like everything, until you do it daily, you will not begin to master the little things that will have your business perform on a high level. It’s the small things practised every day across a few areas of your business that will make the exponential difference.

When it comes to mindset, we must keep our eye, or mind, in this case, on our intention. Our intention sets the context of the daily routines, whether it be with your mindset or business actions. Next, you perform them daily.

The other thing to be aware of is the 80/20. Please don’t get disillusioned if you didn’t do something for a couple of days and give up altogether, i.e., the 20 percent of the 80/20. It’s what you do most of the time, i.e., the 80 percent, that gives you a particular level of performance. Just like in losing weight, if you eat a chocolate bar each day on top of what you normally do and don’t exercise, you will gain weight over time. If you do that one day a month, it won’t make a lot of difference.

The overriding context of your business mindset should be fun and enjoyable. This is your passion; it is not hard work. This is what you were made to accomplish, so be kind to yourself in the process.

The Daily Practices To Master Your Business Success Mindset Are:

1. Inside your context, write out a three-year GOAL(s) you want to accomplish. This would be a paragraph at the most. Be clear, concise, and specific. You may want to use SMART goal setting here.

2. Then within that three-year GOAL, write out a 12-month goal, along with four quarterly milestones that you should achieve to reach your 12-month goal. Once again, be succinct, not a lot of detail here. The world is changing and evolving on a faster basis now than ever before, so I find that having a 12-month planned goal, as well as a three-year MAJOR GOAL, for your business is sufficient to pull you forward on a daily basis without constraint, and it allows you the ability to shift and pivot if needed.

3. Once you have this setup, take the first milestone for the first quarter and break that up into three clear goals (one per month) that you would need to achieve to accomplish the quarterly goal.

4. Now you take your first month and write your list of outcomes (not tasks) that must be done and determine who is going to work on each particular outcome (i.e., what team member if you have a team).

This step-by-step process is very important to set up after you have your intention. It allows you to focus on the outcomes, and the tasks will flow inside that outcome, milestone, goal, and intention.

Taking action is the backbone of mastering a business success mindset, even when you don’t feel like doing so. It will also allow for you to NOT be swayed and get caught up with the “new shiny object” syndrome. What I mean by that is that people who go from one shiny new object to another, spending profits on unnecessary expenses that are not in line with the end milestone, goal, and intention are not focused on the main aim of the game, i.e., their intention. Or, it could mean that their intention is not big enough or inspiring enough to have them take focused action.

Example Goal Mapping

Here is an example of how I have mapped out my goals, milestones, and outcomes.

Intention:

To reduce business failure rate worldwide

Three-Year Goal:

An international business with 100 coaches worldwide having made an impact on over 10 thousand business owners by showing them how to grow and scale their businesses with strategy and mindset

Twelve-Month Goal:

Thirty coaches, each with successful businesses who are coaching and training 25-plus clients on a yearly basis

Quarterly Milestones

• 15 Coaches
• 30 Coaches
• Automatic marketing for clients for coaches
• Replace myself as general manager

Quarter One Outcomes

• Milestone: fifteen coaches
• What -Who
• Master Sales Process – Myself
• 100 warm lead – Subcontractor
• Set up retention system – Admin

Before discussing step 3 in establishing a business success mindset, there is also another set of daily practices that assists with your business success mindset, and they are personal practices.

It has been in my experience that a successful business has a business owner that is healthy, not only in mind but also in body.

Here are some basic practices that you might consider incorporating into your daily routine:

Eat healthy foods.

Exercise daily.

Drink plenty of water.

Get sufficient sleep.

Ensure you have a daily relaxation routine.

Be grateful (at least) once a day.

At the end of the day and before you go to sleep, reflect on at least one thing that you have achieved that will progress your intention and acknowledge yourself for that.

Monitoring Your Progress

This is the step that is the most critical to mastering a business success mindset. Yet it is the most often overlooked and the reason why businesses don’t achieve the momentum they need to move forward with velocity.

How do you know how far you have come if you do not know your progress? There is a saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. This is by far the most important factor in any business, and business owners should set this up in the beginning.

To set yourself up for success, the first step is measuring your progress. Note: I am not saying measuring what you haven’t achieved, that comes from a negative mindset point of view. Rather, I am suggesting that you come from a positive point of view and measure your progress, putting in place different actions that will improve the status of your business for outcomes that were not achieved without any assessment or judgment on the person who was designated that task.

The most significant point in shifting my business mindset was when I shifted my thinking from “something was wrong or right” to “something either worked or didn’t work”. I took out the personalization of right or wrong with any person inside or outside my business, including myself.

For example, I changed our daily progress meetings from sitting in a room around a table to standing at the coffee machine. At the standing meetings, I ask a series of questions to each member of my team.

They include: Are you on track to achieve your weekly goals? If not, what is the challenge? Do we need to schedule additional time outside this meeting to go over that? And, if you are on track, what else do you need from me for the day/week?

That’s it. Each member knows that at the end of the week, they will have an agreed-upon performance measure to achieve.

We discuss the performance measure at the end-of-the-month accountability meeting, where we go through the five following questions:

1. What did you want to achieve?
2. What did you achieve?
3. What did you want to achieve, but didn’t?
4. What are you going to do differently for next month to achieve your goals?
5. What are you going to achieve next month?

These are high-level questions that will encourage each member of your team or yourself if you don’t have a team, move forward towards your quarterly milestone. I encourage you to get a coach to ensure you have a positive experience with this meeting. Answering these questions with integrity and authenticity will help you progress quickly towards your milestone and goals.

The most critical part of this process is not to make anything or anyone wrong. Deal with the real facts of what is happening, and always find something you can acknowledge the other person or yourself for.

This is progress, and when this is done consistently over a period of time, you will achieve your milestones, which, in turn, lead you to achieve your goals. Repeating it each day will build muscle around this for you, and your business success mindset will shine through.

You will be able to achieve anything and everything you desire for your business. What else might surprise you is all the additional benefits that arrive from taking these actions.

Mastering a business success mindset can simply be said to involve the following: have an intention and a clear set of goals, milestones, and outcomes that are monitored and checked on a consistent and regular basis. Your progress with this will manifest into a business success mindset, and this process can be applied to all areas of your life, not just business.

Enjoy the process and success.