Have you ever talked on the phone with someone who isn’t really there?

You  get the sense that they are checking Facebook or their email and not fully listening to what you have to say.  When my coaching clients do this during a phone call, it annoys me.  They are wasting time and money—everyone’s time and their hard-earned money.  

While it seems more efficient to multi-task, in reality, it is bad for your relationships and even worse for your business.

When we get too many irons in the fire,  we become scattered. We’re trying to do too many different things at once and we end up doing none of them well.

Of course, you don’t want to become so focused on one task that you overlook other ways to make money.  In this post, we are going to talk about how you can streamline your business so that you’re able to do what you choose and do it well.

Do You Feel Like You’re Always Working Yet Going Nowhere?

I call this feeling, “being on the hamster wheel” and it is a symptom of being too scattered.

You are all over the place in  your business and it’s not going to get any better if you don’t make some changes.

One of the main causes of feeling scattered is having too many different businesses.  And, for this, I’m counting each niche as a separate business.  

There’s just not enough time, not enough money and not enough of you to really make the connections and create the systems you need for 15 different niches or specialties—or, even FIVE, for most people.  Yes, you are multi-talented and could help your clients with 100 things, but trying to offer them all – all the time is both confusing to the client and exhausting for you.

Obviously, you need a strategy in business. You have to have a workable plan in order to bring in a steady income. But a problem (or multiple problems) can arise when you have too many strategies.  We call this “bright-shiny-object syndrome”.

You might be an entrepreneur who wants to be involved with affiliate marketing. This isn’t a bad thing and it can turn into a steady income stream. But this is an area of marketing that takes time to build and you have to put some effort into it.

If you could devote yourself solely to affiliate marketing, you could make a decent amount of money with it.  That’s great.  The problems start when you don’t give that part of your business enough time to develop before adding something new.

Maybe that’s you. You’ve seen people earn money with their own products and you decide that you want a piece of that pie. So you create a product and you put it out there.

Now, you have both the affiliate marketing and the product creation to keep up with. You feel like this may not be earning enough income fast enough, and you might as well add coaching to the mix.

So you throw that in. You offer your advice to other people so that you can teach them to do what you’ve done. Now with three streams of income, things are getting a little hectic.

You might reach the point where you’re forced to choose between putting out the latest product creation update or investing the time you do have in the coaching side of your business.

And don’t forget – there’s the affiliate marketing, too. You start to feel some pressure when you realize that you could make even more money if you offer services.

Someone comes along and they don’t know how to create a product from start to finish and launch it, so you’ll do that for them and they can just pay you. Or, what about a joint venture?

You could get involved in that. Before you know it, you have several opportunities and they’re all good ones, but now – because you’re so busy giving a little of yourself to each area, stretching yourself thin – none of them are the success that you’d hoped they’d become.

Each area of your business needs your full attention and planning. They have to be nurtured. Handling business endeavors using a drive-by method doesn’t work well.

Business or just ‘busy-ness’?   This is an important distinction.

The key to making it work is to take your time.  Get one part of your business working before you take on something else.  To know if your business is working you must spend time each week looking at your numbers.  What is really working in your business?  Make the time to focus on that.   

Sometimes “smaller” is better.
Need help putting together solid plan?  Take my free Decisive Minds Business Strategy Assessment.  You might even qualify for a free one-to-one session with me.