How to Make Every Day a Little Better So You Can Grow Faster

OK, that’s a big claim in the title but let me explain. What makes your days bad?

Most days, it’s not a big bad thing, like your best employee quitting or your top client canceling or your landlord not renewing your lease. Sure, those things happen and they suck and you deal with it as it comes.

Most of the time, it’s not big bad stuff that makes your day a pain, it’s the little stuff. The aggravating things that you can do but maybe weren’t planning on doing or maybe the thing you have to do every week but dread even though it’s only twenty minutes.

If you think about what makes your day bad or even just temporarily sours your mood it is usually these little aggravations.

And when people really blow their stack it’s often not because of the thing that happened right in that moment, it’s because that was the third or fourth thing that happened in the last few hours that was the one that was a step too far even though on the surface that latest thing wasn’t really a big deal.

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When you run a business it seems like there are about ten of these kinds of things that happen in a typical day. You have to work to stay calm and focused and not let them get to you. It’s not easy and some days the aggravation wins out and you go home feeling beat up and unhappy.

But how does this prevent you from achieving growth? Easy! Who wants to imagine dealing with more of this kind of crap?? When you think about growing the first thought most business owners have is that it will mean even more of this kind of stuff to deal with and that’s the last thing they want.

It’s very hard to think about building more when you spend your day putting out fires on what you already have.

Therefore, if you can make your day a little bit better each day then you feel good about your business and can spend more time thinking about how to grow it. Even more important, you’re motivated to grow it because you don’t hate the way it treats you at the size it is now!

So here’s how to fix this a day at a time in a step by step fashion.

How to Make Your Business a Little Better Every Day

Start with today! I use a yellow legal pad but use whatever works for you.

When the first thing that comes along (don’t worry, it probably won’t be a long wait) that causes you to groan happens, write down what it is.

Then, write down what caused it.

Then, write down some possible ways you could potentially fix it. Examine the options and make sure that you take long enough to think it through to make sure your possible solution will fix it for all the times it could happen, not just this one case. Look at the options and figure out which ones can be implemented realistically and won’t rely on you simply being the one to always solve the problem.

Depending on the size of the problem, this may take a few minutes or a few hours, but it does a few things for you. One, it lets you react to the problem in a positive way because you are taking longer term action to fix it, not just putting out the same fire you’ve put out a hundred times already. Two, it gives you an outlet for what would otherwise turn into some pretty negative feelings. Three, if successful, it means one less problem in your days moving forward.

You don’t have to do this with every problem that crops up, although at least noting what it is would be good so you may tackle it later. But if you can knock off a few of these a week, you’ll find you’ve made 100 improvements over the course of a year.

These don’t all have to be “the phone is ringing” problems, either. You may groan every time you have to do payroll hours, or create customer invoices, or take the truck in for an oil change.

Those are all things you can figure out ways to hand off or at least reduce your workload by training and delegating to someone else so you can use your time for more productive and profitable tasks like making a sale or negotiating a better vendor price or launching a new marketing campaign.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Back when I owned a catering business one of the key weekly tasks was to go through everything we had early Monday morning and put in an order for everything we’d need for the week’s upcoming events. The way they did it before I was the owner was, they would just print all the week’s menus on sheets of paper and then put all the papers on a clipboard.

The owner would walk around through the kitchen (with three walk-in refrigerators and two walk-in freezers!) adding up the items needed for each party and then comparing with what was in stock and doing the math on what to order. They would hand write a list of items to order and then call it in.

The order would come on Tuesday and often on Wednesday we would discover items that were missed (or sometimes, doubled) and we had to then make a run to a grocery store or supplier to make up the difference. Every. Single. Week. This was how they had done it for twenty five years!

By the second month, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I made an Excel program to first outline the food order for each party that week that would then create a combined output list. It would also tally what we had ordered the previous week and what we would have expected to use.

And it included every single item we ever ordered on the same list every week so if someone noticed something we were running low on but it wasn’t noted they would be able to still include it.

I did it for two weeks and on the third week I then trained our head cook on doing it with me. He took it over the fourth week and I never looked back. Our trips to the grocery store all but disappeared and our food costs improved by 10%.

I took a task I had to do and dreaded and turned it into a more efficient process that I no longer had to do at all. My Monday’s got better and I could work more on growing the business.

As it turned out, my Monday headache going away became the head cook’s bad Monday for a different reason. A few weeks after I handed the job off to him, he asked if he could rearrange all our cold storage. I gave him the go ahead and he reorganized everything so like stuff was all kept in the same place and everything was neatly labeled.

He fixed his Monday problem which he didn’t realize was slowing him down until he had to do the inventory himself. Small improvements cascade through the business and everyone benefits. And then you don’t hate your days and don’t mind the idea of the business getting bigger. Win, win!