7 Mistaken Approaches to Productivity a 6/7 Figure Business Cannot Afford To Take

Share This Post

Most six to seven-figure business founders have the wrong definition of productivity. So this leads them to conjure up the wrong approaches they think are doing good but are actually doing harm to their business and the entire team. If they continue making the wrong approaches to productivity, it’s likely that their efforts aren’t steered in the right direction. As a result, business owners will waste time and hinder themselves or their team from making REAL productive progress. In turn, this will impede their goals of reaching eight or nine figures.

If you feel you’re in the same boat, maybe you’re guilty of making these mistakes to productivity (which, by the way, impedes your momentum and potential in scaling your business)!

1. Not being in the right emotional state

When your business reaches six to seven figures, you’re burdened with too many things to do. Entrepreneurs at this level will reach a point of busyness that can impact them emotionally, leaving them in the wrong emotional state.

If business founders aren’t in the right emotional state, it can affect their cognitive abilities and lead to implementing the wrong actions. Tempers can rise, and it’s easy to get frustrated and upset at yourself or your team for crucial mishaps. This also affects your team’s morale, which hampers productivity even more.

Take a mindful moment. Mindfulness is a founder’s secret weapon. It allows you to get centered quickly, and many top professionals also swear by it. Gather yourself, focus only on your breathing, and disconnect temporarily from disturbance before embarking on a new task.

2. Having SOPs that are never seen, benchmarked, or improved

One of our Super Scaling business coaches had recently met up with a client and asked where their SOPs are. However, the client said it was created many months ago. Scaling your business entails many changes and modifications in business operations and work processes. And this is why SOPs are created to have proper guidance on how to do things and put everyone on the same page.

But many six to seven business owners fail to update or improve SOPs, which leads to haphazard work processes that don’t contribute to productivity.

Some examples of approaches that lack the guidance of SOPs are wasting hours daily due to not identifying the right things to do, not having a system to categorize urgent, important, and less important tasks, and doing tasks in batches to save time switching from one task to another.

This gets complex when you need to generate the right kinds of priority lists and KPIs in a larger company. Do your managers know how to do this? If not, it’s likely you are chasing the wrong metrics in the first place. You will definitely want to talk to us about training your team in developing effective managerial thinking.

3. Telling people to do it, but you, yourself, have no clue how!

Six to seven-figure entrepreneurs are bombarded with a load of tasks. More often than not, these entrepreneurs either don’t like to do these tasks or have no clue how to accomplish the tasks. And because they want to get things done, they don’t complete a satisfactory task.

So they hire someone to pass on the responsibility but never share ideas or proper instructions, which leads to the same thing. So if you’re unsure of how to do certain tasks, a rule of thumb is to hire someone competent, so both of you can complement each other’s ideas for more positive results.

We’ve talked a lot about process mapping. This is the ultimate weapon against vagary, and we recommend you try it out. If you have never really understood how process mapping works and understand that it could literally determine the speed of your scaling efforts, contact us for a consultation session so we can show you what you’re missing!

4. Allowing people to do things without a framework to think

Without a framework on which everyone can base their decisions, the team will lack alignment that connects the importance of their tasks to others. So while you give people the freedom to do their tasks, there must also be a set framework that highlights key steps and how these can make or break products or services that customers will love.

Having a framework makes the work lighter because you and your team will have a benchmark for your decision-making process.

5. Not coaching your team

When you get to six or seven figures, you develop this level of trust within your team that makes you think coaching isn’t necessary because they’ve always been at the helm of things. But your team may also experience complacency after a while, which isn’t up to par with standards, hence, the importance of coaching.

To ensure your team showcases competence, it’s vital to transfer information and capabilities through regular coaching. This means asking your team a series of questions that strengthen their thinking capabilities. In our Super Scaling Inner Circle, one of the key capabilities we deliver to our members is coaching. As highly experienced coaches, we don’t just give solutions, but use questions to hone one’s thinking. If you or your team managers want to develop these skills, contact us for a discussion!

6. Thinking that faster is better

Haste makes waste! When entrepreneurs reach six to seven figures, they aim to get everything done fast to keep up with high internal and external demands. But, unfortunately, this method doesn’t rank high on the productivity scale because speed compromises quality.

Business owners must ensure that the work offers value to the customers. If the customer can’t use the work that your team produces, it won’t impact them. Can you imagine getting a delivery of things that you can’t use? This is why the back and forth happens a lot in customer fulfilment, wasting your time and resources.

7. Measure the wrong things

Entrepreneurial intuition is a common alternative to the painstaking process of fact-gathering and analysis. Intuition at Work author Gary Klein said that intuition is “at the center of the decision-making process,” and analysis is “a supporting tool for making intuitive decisions.” But shouldn’t it be the other way around? Isn’t intuition fickle and undependable?

Indeed, many entrepreneurs trust their guts when weighing what matters most in the business. However, these factors might not be the fuel that keeps the engine running in their business. This leads them to measure the wrong metrics that have no impact on business scaling.

For example, suppose you’re investing in social media marketing and tracking the number of likes or followers while neglecting the handful of comments on your posts. In that case, you’re missing out on the real measurement of what customers think of your product or service. Browsing through the comments section will allow you to see positive reviews that give you more ideas on what to showcase and what improvements to make.

This is why a third-party perspective will help you generate the right metrics that will enable a good review of your business’s capabilities.

To sum up, these mistaken approaches to productivity can be avoided if you implement the proper systems that define your behavior and your way of thinking. If you encourage an acceptable method of thinking and pass it on to your team, you can build a bullet-proof team. If you want to know how to bullet-proof your team against changes and mistakes in productivity, reach out to us for a Discovery Call, and our Super Scaling business coach will go through the appropriate systems well-suited for your business.

Make Growing Your Business Fun Again

Are you tired of feeling like you’re growing your business all by yourself? Even Elon Musk sought guidance from Larry Page.

If you’re like many entrepreneurs, you may be stuck and don’t know where to turn to. Or you may be working on the wrong things (and may not even know it!).

Let us help you take back ownership of your business and achieve the success you deserve with our free Launchpad community for entrepreneurs just like yourself.

✅ Get free resources for you to scale up your business
✅ Support from 100s of other entrepreneurs just like yourself
✅ Access to our team of world-class coaches

Sign up today and start making progress! Oh, and did we mention that this is completely free? You just need to be an existing business owner because this is a specially curated community.