No one likes losing, but sometimes it seems harder to win when you run your own business. It doesn’t have to be that way. Since you’re the boss, you can change the rules of the game. Why not play a winner’s game?
Games People Play
The first thing to do is analyze your business to identify the different games that you play. You probably like most of these games, yet somehow everything seems more difficult than when you were an employee. Your old work routine was carefully structured by employers so that there were immediate rewards for success. With your home business, many tasks are ambiguous and take weeks, months, or even years to complete. If you can break your work up into fun and manageable parts with clear outcomes, you’ll be playing a winner’s game. Before you know it, you’ll be winning again.
Are You Playing a Loser’s Game?
When you look at your home business as a collection of games, it’s usually pretty obvious when you’re playing a loser’s game. These are the tasks that you dread doing, continually put off, and strongly believe you need to spend more time on if you want to be truly successful. Other telltale signs of a loser’s game are the belief that everything is “tough” and the idea that you “have to” do things that you don’t like. These games seem to drag on forever and your best efforts never seem to be good enough. Enough is enough! You’ll never win if you keep playing a loser’s game.
Start Playing a Winner’s Game
Changing a loser’s game into a winner’s game is easier than you think. I think the real key is immediate feedback. What is success? Is it having all the clients and business that you could ever want? That’s a difficult thing to do, and no one does it overnight. Businesses are built one client and one job at a time. How often do you respond to emails, talk to potential clients, or connect with people on LinkedIn without generating any actual business? Getting clients often seems like an enormous task with long odds against you. That’s why the most successful salespeople focus on generating leads rather than getting clients. If you get enough people to look, then some of them will buy. Those leads that didn’t pan out right away weren’t really failures. They were steps on the path to success. While getting clients is a common problem for home businesses, other problems can be solved in a similar way. The reason that you keep losing at these games is that you push success away by putting it in the future where nothing can be won today.
Are You Really Winning?
Fooling yourself is not a winner’s game, so it is important that your games match your reality. You do have to consider conversion rates when generating leads. In general, you will probably not go too far astray as long as you are honest with yourself and your target market. Don’t send unsolicited mass emails, harass people over the phone, or do anything else that you wouldn’t like other people to do to you. Properly targeting your efforts will lead to more initial responses and a higher conversion rate over time. You should also try several approaches simultaneously so that you have a better chance at winning in the end. It is a good idea to keep track of your wins, but it is usually easy to tell a true winner’s game from a fool’s errand when you try different approaches.
How to Keep Winning
Once your home business is a winner’s game that works for you and your market, you’ll need to keep up the good work. If you notice that you’re not winning as much as you used to, then the cause is probably a shift in the market. One of the great advantages of your home business is your ability to change with the market rather than waiting to get fired. Change can actually be your ally in keeping games fresh and growing your business. A game that was fun can turn into a dull and stale routine when winning becomes too easy. If you ever get tired of winning, you’ll know that it’s time to pursue new goals that you never thought you could achieve. Welcome to the next level!
