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Build Business with Accountability

Guest post by: Anne Bachrach

Article Overview: Learning how to use accountability to build success for your business is an effective way to build a better business. Regardless of the money invested or personal passion for the business, if you don't hold yourself accountable for the success of your business, there's only a slim chance you will ever reach the level of success you have in mind. How does accountability make a positive impact on the success of your business? Take a look at the four top distinguishing factors of business owners who use accountability to get results.

Build Business with Accountability

Learning how to use accountability to build success for your business is an effective way to build a better business. What exactly is accountability in business? Accountability is taking full responsibility for your actions or non-actions in life and in business. Regardless of the money invested or personal passion for the business, if you don't hold yourself accountable for the success of your business, there's only a slim chance you will ever reach the level of success you have in mind. While there are several components to building a successful business, many entrepreneurs fail to realize that accountability is the driving force behind success or failure. It is essentially a "no-excuses" approach to everything business. Ask any successful business owner and they'll confirm the only reason things happened was because they understand they were the only person who could make or break the business.

How does accountability make a positive impact on the success of your business? Take a look at the four top distinguishing factors of business owners who use accountability to get results.

Top Distinguishing Factors of Business Owners Who Use Accountability

1. Taking full responsibility for action and non-action

2. Organized, productive and efficient in time management and task completion

3. Accept full responsibility for their actions or non-actions in life and in business

4. They understand that nothing comes without discipline and diligence - they never quit.

Highly motivated. Procrastination is at fault for many business failures, and guess who's responsible for procrastination? Yep, you guessed it, you and only you. Understand how to use accountability to build success by taking full accountability for your action and non-action.

Learn what drives your motivation to succeed and exploit it. Maybe you want to retire by age 50, pay for your children's education without going into debt, or pay off your mortgage so you can put more money toward your retirement fund. Whatever the reasons are that drive your motivation, stay connected to them so you can leverage that motivation to avoid procrastination, and keep going until you succeed.

Organized, productive and efficient. Every successful entrepreneur understands that organized and efficient productivity is an essential part of leveraging time and energy. You cannot build a business wasting time or spinning your wheels. You have to learn how to do the most in the least amount of time - and with the least amount of energy. When you integrate accountability into everything you do, there is no finger to point at anyone, but yourself. Taking that responsibility will naturally drive you to put your best efforts forward and keep you organized, productive and efficient.

If you're truly a procrastinator at heart, you may have to bribe yourself with a reward to get things done. For example, don't allow yourself to go to lunch until you complete three of the five tasks on your To-Do List. Another example may be to allow yourself to take a three day weekend if you met your goal(s) for the month.

Alternatively, you may have to implement "retraining" yourself for unproductive behavior. For example, say you procrastinated or wasted time and didn't accomplish your goals for the day, week, or month. To retrain your mind to think in an efficient manner, create a competition with yourself to accomplish a task faster than you have in the past. Use a stopwatch or timer to keep track of your time. The next time you have to do that task, try to beat your old record. Do that each time until you refine the process enough to become highly efficient. Don't sacrifice quality for doing it faster. You can become quicker and still maintain quality.

Accept full responsibility. Accountability and wealth go hand-in-hand! When you learn how to use accountability to build success, you'll begin to see just how much power you have in creating your own reality. Set a bit more than realistic goals, yet you want to stretch yourself a little. Say you need to net $4,000 each month for personal expenses and an additional $3,000 for business overhead? If you need to net a total of $7,000 per month, stretch yourself and shoot for a minimum of $10,000 in sales each month.

Throughout the workday, remind yourself that you are the only one responsible for your reality and take full responsibility for your action or non-action. If you do not meet your goals for the month, don't beat yourself up. Make a list of the actions you took or didn't take and identify where you can make improvements. Use the experience to learn how to refine your actions for better results next time, and use it to set new goals.

Discipline and diligence. Accountability is a major key to improving discipline and diligence and with that comes improved results. When you understand that the "buck stops here," accountability suddenly provides a very clear picture that discipline and diligence will produce results. Never, ever quit until you succeed.

It's up to you to take the actions required to achieve your goals. Successful business owners are disciplined for a reason - it's because their diligence produces results. You must consistently become your own motivator and cheerleader, although it can be challenging at times to be so.

The truth is for most, when left to our own devices we let too many distractions keep us from the activities we know we need to do and yet don't do them for whatever it is that's stopping us. These groups (or coaching) will provide you with support when you need to push through fear or doubt and take action to get the results you desire.

Joining a mastermind or accountability group (or coaching) is vital to your success. As a member of one of a mastermind or accountability group (or coaching client) you will be surrounded by like-minded individual(s) who can hold you accountable for your actions or non-actions. To help you with guidelines of various groups, go to my website and review some ideas to help you get started. You will always need help in evolving and improving your life and business, and accountability is the only way to achieve your goals.

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Article Tags: accountability, achieve, business owners, business success, money, results



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My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
How do you know if you have a good idea? - [quote="orxan":3118uboz]My advise is FOCUS on your business. Focusing is the main factor to succeed on business. If you have a great idea, then follow it only, don't look anywhere else. It is especially essential in an online business. Because there are a lot of mind blowing sales letters promising millions dolllars or overnight success, people find it difficult to concentrate on one business and they lose their energy. Concept is simple. 1- Have a good idea; 2- Build your business on it; 3- Monetize your business; 4- Promote it; 5- Build list of responsive customers; 6- Maintain You Business. Focusing and not fearing from competition (instead you can learn from competitiors) are main tips of billionaires ,BTW. Orxan[/quote:3118uboz] Thanks orxan! But how do you know if you truly have a good idea or not? If we ask ourselves, we may be suffering from tunnel vision. On the other hand, friends/family may try to discourage us from pursuing a small business because of their own fears, while others will simply give us an empty "you can do it!" line.
Re: How to do Link Building? - Be diligent. Build blogs.Pay attention to the contents.
Re: Are Business Owners too Old School to be Sold by a blog - I think this question needs to be redefined. Is it the the senior demographic that you're posing this question to? There is a wide range of business owners young and old. Some of the older folks can grasp the quick changes occurring on the net and go with the flow, while others have lost interest. I see blogs as next generation websites... they are superior than websites in so many ways. Sophisticated webmasters are cloaking their blogs to look like websites, so it's hard to discern whether it's even a blog, yet it has all the great functionality of a blog. Business owners need to embrace the internet regardless of their industry. Currently, I see the ideal combination looking like this: Build a static website, add a navigation link to a 'current news' feature or the like, which is your blog, and get the best of both worlds. Or as I said, build a blog that looks like a website. Finally - If the Marketing message is well done, then I don't see why it shouldn't be effective regardless of the format.


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