Infusionsoft Users and All Business Owners MUST Avoid this Death Blow

I attended my quarterly Marketing Automation Group Mastermind meeting recently.  The common thread between us all is that all we use Infusionsoft to market our businesses.  But the biggest thing we all get from our membership is the support and accountability we get from each other.  We’ve gotten to know each other and our businesses well. We’ve connected on a personal level and are now vested in each other’s success.

I could never have grown my business without the support and accountability I have gotten from this group these past three years.

In this last meeting Lisa Rangel, who is also a client, used the phrase that's worth pasting on the wall in front of my desk, printing on everyone's coffee mug and emailing it to myself daily. I think it’s that important.  It’s:

“A productive distraction is a death blow to your business.”

We entrepreneurial business owners can so easily fall into a trap.  Lisa brought it up because she was working on things that were clearly productive, but not her top priority.  Because it’s productive, it was easy for her to justify it.  She could even point to measurable results for having worked on that.

Everything we do professionally and personally should support the goals we have set for ourselves.   These should be goals that commit us to our plan of action.  They should be very specific and focused and then every activity or task we take on is measured against. It must support of the goal.

I’m our team’s top technical resource.   It’s my company and I’m the one that’s developed our best practices.   My top, top, top priority, and I have it written down so I can review it daily, is marketing, lead generation and sales.  I’m good at it.  I enjoy doing it and it energizes me.  And as every business owner knows (or had better know), without sales fueling your business nothing else really matters.

At the same time, I’m an engineer by training.  My team depends upon me as the senior technical team member.  It’s a huge temptation for me to take on technical work that could be offloaded and delegated to other team members.  Many times it is much more efficient for me to do it myself than to let someone else do it.  However, it’s a tendency I must overcome.

There are things in my business that only I can do.  In my case it’s the sales and marketing I just mentioned.  There are others that team members with the right guidance and training can do instead. They may not be able to do it quickly, but with my guidance, they can deliver it to the quality standards we’ve set for ourselves.

Better yet, if I focus on this mode of operation, I will continue developing team members skills so months into the future, they will be solo what today requires my guidance. And better yet, they would probably better than I ever could.

That’s why I have to do EVERYTHING in my power to focus on my top priority.  I need to look at even seemingly benign productive distractions as if they were a knife to the chest.  These time-sucks must be stomped out and seen as a “Death Blow” as Lisa calls it because that's what they are.

I’m either highly focused on taking this business forward or I’m not.  Becoming comfortable with the consequences and potential chaos caused because I’m focused on my top priority is something I must do.  In order to get to this ultimate order I truly seek, I need to walk through these periods of uneasiness as we change and mature and grow knowing the end results will be progress.  But the results of unfocused priorities sucking away precious time, is unacceptable and something I as a small business owners must eliminate completely.

Let me know what you think about this.