If you wait for other people you will never get anywhere

Do something, anything!

Jobs, business development, introductions, referral etc. Have some self-responsibility and commitment

How often have you waited for someone else to act before you’ve taken action?

I’m not talking about pulling out of a junction when driving, I mean big things. Applying for jobs, responses to proposals, booking holidays.

I’ve not applied to a job in a while now, however, when I was job hunting I would apply to a firm and then wait for an outcome. If I had interviews with other companies I struggled to commit if the job I wanted was still open.

The result?

Procrastinating on the jobs I wasn’t sure about meant I wasn’t offered them, the job I was holding out for didn’t come off. Result, no job.

I see it in business all the time, a flurry of activity creates a couple of strong opportunities. The work goes in and the proposal goes out and the waiting starts. 2 weeks later the feedback comes, great proposal but we’re not going to work with you. Ah, where are we now?

During those 2 weeks we sat back assuming we’d get the work and as such did no business development. We now have no work and no pipeline.

Take the diagram below: this shows business growth when we wait for activity to convert to sales. There are peaks and troughs of activity; we will win some work but never be operating at capacity because we don’t do anything meaningful after the flurry of activity that creates a couple of conversations.

In life this means that we plod along waiting for things to happen, in business we create some wins but are not overly successful, in work we wait to be told what to do and our lack of initiative means Doris gets promoted ahead of us.

What can we change?

Through constant activity we can create more opportunities; in the context of business without improving our conversion ratio we generate more sales. Note. activity will drop off slightly because when we actually have work to do we need to create time to do it, however, there will be an upward trend:

You can see that without increasing our input we achieve more by simply being more consistent with the input and not sitting back to scroll through social media.

The Serious Part

A classic micro-management excuse is “it is easier to just do it myself”. In this context it is essential to do it yourself because no one will do it for you.

Want more leads? Prospect more.

Want a better job? Work out what you need to get one and go and do it.

Want to get fit? Decide what activity you enjoy and do it.

There are no shortcuts in life, you get out what you out in.

But they’re always so lucky…. Bullshit, you just don’t see how hard they’re working behind the scenes. Making things happen for themselves.

Take recruitment as an example, why do some agency recruiters do better than others? They follow the process and even when they are making placements they continue picking up the phone to generate more work. This means they have consistent monthly billings.

The people who fail in agency recruitment (and I speak from experience here) do what they must to get some work on, fill the positions and then have no pipeline because they weren’t motivated to do more business development in the meantime. This creates the cyclical curve we discussed before.

Want to achieve something with your life or business?

Personally I find working backwards and creating a serious of mini projects a waste of time, I lose interest (this is someone who spent more time writing out a GCSE revision timetable than they did actually revising).

My approach, set a target and everyday do something that moves you towards it. The more serious you are about your goal the more you will do.

Struggling for motivation to do anything towards your goal?

Then that probably isn’t your real ambition but one that you think you should have. When you find your true calling working towards it isn’t a chore, instead you find yourself making time and excuses to do it.