Five Hacks for Business Rookies

One of the things I have learned in life is to always ask myself if I got enough value for my time and money. This question has helped me put a lot of things into perspective in my journey as an entrepreneur. One of your major goals as a new business owner should be to weigh the impact of everything you do.

Starting out as an entrepreneur isn’t the easiest thing to do on earth. With the ever-evolving nature of the business world, only the most strategic people get to rise above the stormy waters of starting a new business.

Despite being one of the most competitive countries in the business world, there’s a lot of ease in doing business in Singapore. But just like everything in life, you have to know the best hacks to stay at the top of the radar.

In this post, I have grouped these strategies into five ingenious hacks to help you grow your new business as a rookie:

Use the Five Cs

As a new business, you’ll want to attract investors and increase ROI. Use the five Cs, to position yourself well enough to attract business partners or investors, stay in business, while generating enough returns to maintain productivity. This is a very strong foundation upon which you can build a capital base for your new business. The five Cs are: character, cash flow, capital, collateral, and condition.

“Collar the Thief”

Everyone deals with a certain level of procrastination, no matter how inconsequential it may seem. As Charles Dickens rightly says, “procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.” Procrastination will literally have you spend so much time doing nothing. How do you “collar” this thief of time? Form productive habits from the tasks you often encounter in your business endeavors. Once you beat procrastination and form good habits, you’ll find yourself handling tasks with minimal stress and effort.

Adopt the Three Rs of Habit Formation

Many entrepreneurship books tell you about different habits you must imbibe as a new business owner to stay at the top of your game. Here’s a super trick to help you stay on track with any habit you might want to adopt for your business/personal growth. Call it the Three Rs of habit formation:

·  Reminder: create an impulse for your habits. For example, the natural impulse for feeding is hunger which manifests in either a rumbling stomach or a tingling in your stomach. This is what prompts you to eat. Eating in itself is the next ‘R’ which is:

·  Routine: Once there is an impulse that prompts you to do what needs to be done, a routine follows naturally. For instance, if your reminder is a mobile phone alert that goes off by noon, you are expected to respond with an action (routine). This may be a meeting, a task, meditation, etc. It pays to add new habits to your routines instead of creating new routines that might become cumbersome.

For example, if you are trying to form the habit of drinking water every morning, you could add a “drink water” reminder to the existing reminder for stand up, instead of having two different reminders. This way, in time, you’ll find yourself in the habit of always drinking water before stand up, even without a reminder.

·  Reward: there should be real, measurable reward for every habit. If timeliness is the habit you wish to form, the reward could be discipline in you and among your staff through your exemplary leadership.

Break Down Difficult/Big Tasks

As an entrepreneur, you’ll have a lot of things to attend to. Know which task requires urgent attention and which you should attend to later. Which of these tasks are difficult? Break the difficult tasks into manageable, realistic bits. Your SMART goal setting strategy comes in handy here. Think of the bigger picture as you are breaking the tasks down and ensure that you come up with an orderly action plan that will give the desired result.

Outsource

This is the last but not in any way the least hack. Outsourcing some non-essential aspect of your business activities gives you enough time to focus on more important business dealings. You may want to outsource tasks like web development, accounting, content creation, etc. to experts. This gives you more time to focus on other things without any aspect of your business lagging behind.

According to the World Bank’s 2021 ease of doing business report, Singapore currently ranks at number one. This means that there’s a lot of competition, especially for new businesses. To stay ahead of the game, you have to deal differently from the others. Business is no longer suits and ties, tea or coffee as it used to be. You have to brace up to the tides of time by imbibing these strategies as a new business owner who wishes to match up to competition.

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