We have been exploring the seven steps to accelerating business growth. The first four steps are clarity of direction, communication, having a plan, and intense focus. Step five is discipline. The power of discipline is that it unlocks results; no sustained business growth is achieved without discipline.

For some people, the word discipline has a negative connotation, but we have to get past that idea. Discipline means staying at it every day. It’s a commitment to focus on what we need to accomplish each day and those priorities.

It’s simple but true: Successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. They’re persistent. It’s sort of like going to the gym. I don’t like getting up in the morning and going to the gym, but I do it. Successful people may not like it, but they’re disciplined to do it every day. World-class athletes and musicians don’t dabble around the edges. They’re intensely focused and they’re disciplined to work at it every single day.

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
I used to fly an airplane for the company I worked for; I flew for 22 years. When you’re flying an airplane and you decide you want to go a different direction, then you set the new course setting and turn the yoke. The yoke is like the steering wheel in your car; but I learned quickly that if I didn’t keep the pressure on the yoke, the airplane would naturally spin back and go the direction it was going previously because of momentum.

It’s similar for us as people and for businesses. If we don’t keep the pressure on that yoke and keep pushing forward in the direction we want to go, we will go back to the direction we had been going. That’s human nature. It’s hard to break that momentum, and that’s what makes discipline necessary. We have to keep the pressure on and be intensely focused every single day.

Successful people are consistent in their practice of applying discipline to their daily lives. Tony Robbins says, “Repetition is the mother of all skill,” and that means repeating it over and over and being intentional about the habits that we form. If we’re not intentional about the habits that we form, our habits will form us. We have to decide what is it going to take to be successful and then be intensely focused on that in a disciplined way. The genius of the most successful people in the world is rooted in discipline.

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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Once you have an established plan of action, the next step is focus, and this is often missing in organizations these days. You have to develop intense, unapologetic focus on your plan of action in order to achieve the business growth you are looking for.

Distractions are everywhere these days, and they will prevent you from sticking to the path to your desired future. Most people I meet underestimate the power of focus. You can have a great vision, strategy, and plan, but if you don’t bring focus to it, then you’re not going to get where you want to go.

It’s important to evaluate the highest and best use of your time and talent. It goes back to that old 80/20 rule: 20 percent of our activities generate 80 percent of the results. Time, energy, and money are limited resources. Nobody can make another minute of time; that’s why evaluating your use of time is so valuable.

I’m finding that many business owners are distracted by their cell phone and social media in particular. We’re reading text messages and checking in with Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. All that takes us away from being intensely focused on the plan of action that we want to achieve our vision of the future. Every time we get distracted, it takes ten to twenty minutes for us to get refocused. We’re allowing ourselves to be robbed of time!

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
Intense focus looks like a story I read about Richard Branson. An organization offered him $100,000 to come and speak at their event. He declined. Then they offered $250,000, yet he declined again. They offered half a million dollars, but he turned that down as well. Finally they approached him and asked what it would take, and he said that no amount of money would take him away from what he was currently focused on. This is the kind of focus we all need.

It’s valuable to learn to block off periods of time to be productive, and to eliminate distractions during those blocks of time. Turn off your phone and all of its notifications. You’ll be surprised at how much can be accomplished in two hours with no distractions. I recommend to my clients that they don’t check their email first thing in the morning because email is somebody else’s agenda for you. Block off time later in the day to answer phone calls or emails or text messages. Take the first few hours of the day to be intensely focused on your priorities.

It helps to consider what an hour of your time is actually worth. In other words. If you want to make $75,000 a year, you have to generate $36 an hour worth of value for your clients. That’s $3 every five minutes, or $9 every 15 minutes. If you want to make $125,000 a year, you have to produce the value worth $60 an hour. That’s $5 every five minutes. Oftentimes I’ll ask clients, “What’s an hour of your time worth?” They’ll tell me, “Oh, $150,” or, “$200 an hour.” Then I ask them, “Then why are you doing $15 an hour work?” Why are you doing the bookkeeping that’s worth maybe $40 an hour when you could pay someone else to do that?

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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When you know the direction you want your organization to go in, you have to have a plan of action to get there. Otherwise, you’ll remain stuck in a world of dreams. Every destination requires a map. If you want to achieve business growth and success, you will need a plan of action to get you there and then to sustain your growth.

A plan of action outlines how you will bridge the gap between your current state and your desired future. If you were going to go hiking in the woods, you would want to have a map before you enter the woods, not after you’ve already set out. Business is the same. I have encountered many organizations that have created bold visions of the future but they don’t have a plan of action on how to get there.

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
When organizations do a good job of strategic planning and communicating that to their employees, then employees wonder, “How am I going to execute on that?” This is where the problem comes. So I suggest that we chunk things down into smaller increments. I like to chunk things down into 90-day increments because studies have shown that 90-day increments are really important to organizational success. At the end of 90 days people start to get off track and lose direction. The next 90-day increment is an opportunity to bring them back and refocus their attention on what to do to move the organization closer to that one-year vision of the future.

Each department can say, “This is what we’re going to do in the next 90 days to get us closer to that one year vision.” Then they should write these things down. Just like the five-year, three-year, and one-year clarity of direction, you need to write down what you are we going to do as a department in the next 90 days to move yourselves closer to achieving that one-year vision.

It’s important to read it every day to reinforce it repeatedly in your mind. Then you can keep coming back to that, and if you ever have the question as to where you’re going or what you should be doing, you can ask yourself whether what you’re considering is moving you closer or further away from your 90-day goals and your one-year vision. This makes the decision relatively easy because you need to stay focused in order to make that happen.

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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A common issue in organizations is that leadership knows where the organization is going, but the employees do not. When direction is not communicated effectively, employees attempt to figure that out for themselves and then act accordingly, creating chaos. Effective communication gets everyone on the same page and eliminates confusion, helping to accelerate business growth.

Without effective communication, we tend to create silos of individual departments determining where they’re going—and that’s not necessarily in keeping with where the organization wants to go. That creates chaos within organizations, and chaos is the enemy of efficiency.

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
Effective communication will get everybody within the organization on the same page. It eliminates chaos, confusion, and hearsay. Imagine how well your company could do if everybody was in the same boat, on the same river, paddling the same direction. It’s different if there’s one person paddling the boat—then it’s pretty easy to direct the boat. But when you have 20 or 30 or 40 people within the organization and they’re not all paddling in a same direction, then you can’t get where you want to go. You can’t achieve that vision of the future that you want to achieve.

Most employees want to know where they’re going, what the future holds, and they want to be a part of something that’s bigger than themselves. This is particularly true for young people today. They’re not interested in just punching a timecard for 40 years, and doing the same thing over and over. They want to know that there’s an opportunity for the organization and for them within that organization. Communicating that clearly is critical.

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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As business owners, success is our goal, but sometimes we get so focused on today’s details, we forget to focus on the big picture of growth. As a business consultant and coach, I help business owners who want to take their business to the next level and make more money in the process. In my 40 years of experience I have found that accelerating business growth comes down to seven basic steps. The first is clarity of direction.

Creating Your Own Path

Clarity of direction is knowing where you want to be in the future for your business and your personal life. If we decide to take a thousand journey, we need to know where we want to end up. If I get on an airplane, I know where I’m going. If I don’t, I could end up anywhere. It’s the same in our business and our personal lives. Clarity of direction is knowing where you want to be in the future and taking the time to describe that. What does that look like for my business and my personal life?

In addition to knowing where you want to go, you have to know where you currently are. That’s your current state— where you’re at currently in this present moment in your business and your personal life. What is the current reality? You have to be truthful about that and be real. That is what allows you to see the gap between your current state and desired future.

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
The next step in clarity of direction is to go out five years from now and describe what that is going to look like for you in your business and your personal life. How many employees do you want to have? How much money are you going to make? How big of a business do you want? How many weeks of vacation do you want to take? Describe it and write it down and it should be not much more than six or seven items.

Then work backwards. So if you want to be at this particular future state in five years, where do you need to be three years from now? The idea is to do the same thing and write that down. Include six or seven items and what that looks like. Describe it and write it down. And then working backwards again, where do you want to be a year from now? So if you need to be here in three years, where do you need to be in a year from now?

We need to dream big and be bold about that, because it’s our life, it’s our future. And why not dream big? We shouldn’t let our small business make us small-minded. You didn’t start your business by thinking small, and you didn’t get into business just to do okay. You want to create a vision of your future business and personal life, and the way to do that is to write these things down. Once you write them down, your subconscious mind goes to work to start to make those things happen.

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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Growth is what every business owner should be after. As a business consultant and coach, I help business owners who want to take their business to the next level and make more money in the process. In my 40 years of experience I have found common missteps that hinder growth. I address those missteps as I help owners visualize and implement the future they want for their business using a set of clear, concrete concepts: clarity of direction, communication, have a plan, intense focus, discipline, results, and motivation.

What Skills Do I Need for My Business to Thrive?

Business owners often get into business based on the technical skills that they’ve acquired through working at other businesses. They haven’t acquired the skills and the tools necessary to be successful in business. You can’t wear all the hats.

The second misstep I’ve noticed that is most common with business owners who are not experiencing kind of results that they is they haven’t been clear on what it is they want to achieve. This ties into another common issue: lack of clear communication to employees about where the business is going. That lack of clear communication creates chaos within businesses.

The fourth issue is neglecting to have a plan on how they’re going to bridge the gap between their current state and their desired future. They may know where they want to go and they may have effectively communicated it, but a plan of action is needed.

The fifth thing that I’ve noticed is that individuals within the organizations aren’t intensely focused. They’re distracted by so many things and so much clutter and non-essential work that they’re not getting the kind of results that they want to get. The organization just fumbles along.

Making Your Goal the Focus

I’ve also noticed that individuals within organizations are not disciplined to stay at it every day. We focus on non-essential work—the 80 percent—rather than the 20 percent that generates the greatest return of our investment of time and energy and money. In order to be disciplined, we have to use our calendar to block off time during the day to be intensely focused on our priorities for that day or for that week.

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
These missteps often lead to discouragement, and when we get discouraged, we tend to give up; we simply lose motivation. If we’re not doing the seven steps that we mentioned previously, that leads to discouragement and loss of motivation—and then we don’t get the results. It’s a vicious cycle. We have to return to what works, which leads to results and greater motivation. Then we repeat the process and just keep raising the bar.

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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