Bad Advice the business gurus have given you – By Douglas Vermeeren

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If you spend a little time online listening, watching or reading the words of many of the so-called business or entrepreneur gurus it wont take you long until you the necessity of hustling and grinding to grow your business. 

Encouragement is given to get up in the early hours of the morning and then stay up way later than everyone else who has gone to bed in an effort to build a business. They claim that the hustle and grinding are the foundations of business success.

While I agree with the idea that hard work is important to building a business hustle and grinding alone are not.

It’s important to point out that while these gurus encourage you to hustle and grind they really haven’t been clear about what that means and what your should be doing. The reason quite simply is that most of them don’t know. Hiding behind these popular catch phrases is the best they can do. 

So if you are going to work hard and putting in effort hustling or grinding let me tell you what you should be building.

The goal of an entrepreneur is not to build a prison built by walls of activity. The goal is not to be busy and success is not to be measured that way. Instead, the measure of success for an entrepreneur is how effectively they can design systems and strategies that create freedom and profit.

As you hustle and grind your efforts need to be focused on creating efficiency.

 Years ago a successful entrepreneur friend of mine pointed out an interesting thought from his experience in building a multi-million dollar car dealership empire. Said he, “Innovation doesn’t always mean to expand. More often it means to simplify.”

Another entrepreneur that continues to mentor me has a net worth of over 800 million dollar. Most of his wealth was built through land acquisitions and operating a string of retail locations. His advice was that time should be spent measuring your most success efforts and then duplicating them through systems involving other people or automation.

If you must hustle then much of that effort should be spent building relationships seeking out people who can duplicate your best efforts or expand beyond them with their energy or skillsets.

Your goal as entrepreneur is not to do more and get busier. Your goal is to simplify and systematize. Your mission is to increase sales and profits. Anything or any activity that does not contribute to that is a waste or your efforts and time.

Despite how the gurus have instructed you the efforts required to systematize and expand your sales generally will not require you to wake up before the crack of dawn, nor to stay up later than everyone around you. Your income must be attached to your systems and not your efforts. 

Business success always comes to those who understand how to work smarter not harder. John D. Rockefeller one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of all time put it this way, “He who works all day, has no time to make money.”

Money and success is created through effective strategy, not by grinding harder and trading more time.

Warren Buffet, certainly one fo the most successful entrepreneurs of all time said it this way, “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will ahve ot work until you die.”

Again a clear invitation to separate your income from your efforts. Hustle and grind if to be used effectively must create systems to grow your business.

So what should you be spending your time doing if you are to be successful as an entrepreneur or business owner? How can you ensure more profitable results for your efforts?

When using your time always return to the transactions you are looking to create. What are your customers giving you money for? And when you have discovered that the best questions you can use your time asking are the following:

How can you improve the effectiveness of this transaction?

How can you find more people to enter into these transactions?

Who can help you develop better systems?

Who can help you find more customers?

How can you simplify these processes?

How can you market and share messaging around this transaction?

What other transactions can you create?

As you focus your hard work you’ll soon find that an extreme hustle or constant grind is actually counterproductive to where you will want to take your future. Recognize that wile successful people are often very busy – it’s not doing the things that the gurus are promoting. And the invitation to grind hard or hustle heavy are equations that will create burn out, frustration and failure. 

Over the last two decades Douglas Vermeeren has conducted extensive first hand research into the lives of the worlds top achievers. He has the success strategies of top business leaders from Nike, Reebok, Fruit of the Loom, FedEx, KFC, United Airlines, Microsoft, Disney and others to share with you. ABC television and FOX Business refer to him as the modern Day Napoleon Hill.  He has authored 3 books in the Guerrilla marketing series and is the CEO of Entrepreneur of Influence . He is a regular featured expert on FOX, CNN, ABC, NBC, CTV, CBC, The Huffington Post, NY Daily News and others.