Friday Favorites: Good Habits of Successful Entrepreneurs

This week’s edition of our Friday Favorites addresses a few bad habits you should kick and replace with better habits. With a more focused mindset and good habits in place, you’ll be well on your way to being a successful entrepreneur in no time!

• “9 Bad Habits That Every Entrepreneur Struggles With,” by Marty Zwilling of YoungEntrepreneur

Starting a business is hard enough—don’t make it harder on yourself by worrying about and devoting excess time to things that aren’t really that important. Are you in business to make money, or to make friends? Because you have faith in yourself as a leader, or because you second-guess yourself at every turn?

• “Why Lie?” by Seth Godin

Salespeople have trained us, as consumers, to lie to them. In this brilliant food-for-thought post, Seth Godin shows us how salespeople disrespect their prospects by making certain assumptions when they don’t bite (they’re stupid, they aren’t listening…) and suggests an alternative method that doesn’t make them feel like their judgement is being questioned.

• “Teaching Your Business to Manage Itself,” by John Jantch of DuctTape Marketing

If you’re out to make your small business “normal,” you’re doing it wrong. This excellent post shows up how to keep an eye toward the three Cs—Clarity, Culture, and Community—and launch your business beyond “normal” and into almost self-managing territory.

• “Smallbiz HR dilemma: A promotion without raise. Proceed with caution.” by Geoff Vincent of BizCompare

Small businesses can’t afford extravagant salaries. That’s just a fact of being a small business. And sometimes employees are stretched pretty thin. But dumping more and more work on your employees “because they can handle it” rather than hiring a new employee to help with a growing workload is a great way to facilitate employee burnout—and doing this without any additional compensation is, essentially, punishing your great employees by rewarding their hard work with more work. Don’t undervalue and overwork your great employees, or they WILL go elsewhere.