3 Ways You’re Sabotaging Your Business

This article comes from Entrepreneur.

3 Ways You’re Sabotaging Your Business

You could be sabotaging your business without even realizing you’re doing it. And it starts in the same place you had the idea in the first place: your mind. Be mindful of these three pitfalls.

1. You fear change.

In today’s hyperspeed world, organizations aren’t free to have the same sort of slow, conservative outlook. When everything around you is moving at the speed of light, a risk-averse, slow-to-react leadership team will get left behind and eventually fall to pieces.

Sometimes we have to embrace change to get ahead. Even the most conservative of businesses have benefited from taking on some risk to change their circumstances. Take Citibank, for example. In the late ’90s, no bank could get an edge on its competitors. Citi decided to take a risk on an ad campaign called “Live Richly,” which pushed a more balanced life and the idea that money isn’t the most important thing — an unusual message for a bank. It took some selling, but as the Harvard Business Review case study notes, it paid off tremendously in both brand awareness and traffic, with a huge uptick in bank activity.

Change happens. Don’t try to avoid it. Embrace it. Even push for it if your business is getting stale. A business that’s not moving forward is a business that’s dying.

2. You set mental limits.

Sometimes we cut ourselves off from opportunity before we even give the door a chance to open. People who are naturally anxious are more likely to do it, but everyone does it once in a while. Underselling your services, whether that be in pricing or in conversation, is one of the most common ways this happens. It can also keep you from growing your business as effectively.

We all have patterns of thought, whether positive and negative, that affect the way we view the world. Psychologists call these “schemas.” If we’ve somehow built up a negative worldview, or we’ve decided that this is as far as we’ll go, there’s a pretty good chance it’ll become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

3. You do everything yourself.

When it comes to your business, you’re the one who knows how it runs. You’re the one who’s been there from the beginning, and it’s your vision and guidance that has built it to the point it’s reached and paid the groundwork for the future. And the day-to-day in and out of the company is the same. Everything has to run according to the master plan because if something doesn’t go quite right, it’ll be the end of the world. You have to write this article, parse this spreadsheet, meet this client. You have to make the purchasing decision for the next round of servers. Someone else might have gotten it wrong.

Believe it or not, though, this attitude can be absolutely poisonous to your business. According to one study from i4cp, 46 percent of businesses are worried about their employees’ delegation skills. Delegation is something that has to start at the top, and as a founder or owner, it’s incredibly easy to bury yourself in work and never want to hand it off.

As one Gallup study points out, businesses with owners that delegate grows faster, generate more revenue and create more jobs. Other people may not do exactly what you do, but that’s part of the risk you take when you hand off parts of your business to other people. Giving away the tasks that other people actually can do frees time for you to work on the parts that you really have to do yourself.

It’s hard enough to run a business as it is. Are you getting in your own way with any of these three problems? If you are, today is the day to stop. Learn to get out of the way of your own business and you’ll be able to watch it flourish.

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