4 Simple Habits That Boost Your Bottom Line

As a small business owner, it’s easy to get bogged down with the seemingly endless tasks getting piled on your plate.

Luckily, there are a few simple key habits you can incorporate into your workflow that will boost your bottom line and streamline your operations.

These habits may take a few weeks to solidify, but they’ll bring a lifetime of benefits. Let’s dive right in:

1. Prioritize Your Daily Tasks

Being able to manage time is more than just keeping yourself busy—it’s being able to accomplish the most important tasks in the quickest way possible. How do you do this?

It all starts with prioritizing your daily business activities. Here are a few questions to get you started:

• What do I need to accomplish today?
• Of those tasks, which are most pressing? Which have the most impact?
• Which activities most directly impact my bottom line?

If you get into the habit of laying out your daily activities and prioritizing them, you’ll end up spending your valuable time on important and impactful tasks.

Prioritizing daily tasks is a surefire way to increase cash flow, but it works best when coupled with the next habit…

2. Track One Major Business Metric

Your business has to juggle a lot of key metrics. When you set out to improve too many at once, you’ll probably drop the ball.

Truth is, you can’t juggle four balls until you can juggle three, and you can’t juggle three balls until you can juggle two.

In other words, it’s important to place all your focus on one key metric at a time. Don’t stop concentrating your efforts on that metric until it becomes second nature to your business.

This metric will help guide you in prioritizing your daily tasks. If, for example, you want to focus on customer loyalty and retention, then you should prioritize daily tasks that will help your business improve in that area.

3. Learn to Delegate

While you may be a jack-of-all-trades who can do the job better than your employees, that doesn’t mean you should. Your time and energy are too valuable to be wasted on less-important business tasks.

Being an everything guy is a tough habit to break, so try writing, “I will delegate today” on a sticky note or setting a daily delegation reminder on your phone. Do whatever it takes to make delegating a habit.

When you finally hand over a few of the reins, you’ll have more time to focus on improving your chosen business metric, your employees will feel more important and trusted, and your business will start to reap the dividends of increased productivity.

4. Be Frugal

Benjamin Franklin said it best: “a penny saved is a penny earned.” Increasing business revenue through savings is often as simple as making sure to comparison shop before placing an order.

You can also cut costs by taking a monthly inventory of your expenditures and identifying extraneous purchases.