5 Bad Business Habits You Should Get Rid of in 2023

Every entrepreneur wants his or her business to succeed, but the sad reality is that 90% of startups fail. Only a fraction of new ventures last beyond their first two years of operation.  

Rarely does a business fail or stagnate because of a catastrophe. The problem usually lies underneath the little actions you make that you think are harmless, such as putting things off and trying to do everything on your own, but are actually slowly bringing down the efficiency and momentum of your business.  

You can start a business with a valuable idea and recruit the most qualified individuals to boost your chances to succeed, but even the best plans won’t make up for a lack of good business habits.  

Your bad habits manifest in the decisions you make and the actions you take. As the most trusted SEO company in Miami, we recommend that you make it a focus to get rid of bad habits and adopt new ones that will propel you to succeed this 2023.  

Here’s how!  

The Secret to Forming New Habits Successfully Is to Accept Failure, Especially At First

According to sociologist Dr. Christine Carter, to succeed at building new habits, you need to be willing to be bad at them first.  

Nobody who decides to learn a new skill or venture into a new business, no matter how smart or skilled they are, perfects it right away.  

In the beginning, you’re more likely to falter and make mistakes than achieve an instant state of flow.

The first step towards forming new habits successfully is to identify your bad ones and get rid of them.  

Bad Business Habits That Stop You From Succeeding

1. Failing to Delegate

Entrepreneurs treat their businesses as their babies. So we get it if you have the urge to do everything on your own and find it hard to entrust certain responsibilities to others. However, it’s necessary if you want your business to grow.  

Not only is it exhausting on your end, it’s also detrimental to the health of your business. A hands-on approach becomes harder to maintain as your business evolves.  

Your ability to let go and learn to delegate without micromanaging also dictates how fast you can scale your business. So, this 2023, work on learning to trust your staff and delegate efficiently.  

Here are the different ways delegating effectively can help grow your business, according to the best SEO and marketing company in Miami:

• Avoid professional burnout. Burnout negatively impacts your work performance. It can lead to procrastination, tardiness, and avoidance of responsibilities. It can also make you lose your appetite, experience constant fatigue, and frequent sickness.  
• Your business’ ability to evolve relies on your team’s ability to grow. If your team can’t grow, neither can your company. In order for your employees to grow, they need to be able to take on a wider range of tasks and more responsibilities. This is how they can become more reliable, more skilled, and more valuable to your business.  

• You want your business to be able to function in the future, even without you. You want your team to be able to keep your business running while you’re out on vacation or venturing on another business. This allows you to do more.  

How to delegate efficiently:

• Be honest about your strengths and weaknesses. Delegate tasks that you’re not good at and responsibilities you don't need to do.
• Choose the right people to assign certain tasks. He or she should have the ability to take on more work and the skill to do the task well.

• Create a delegation plan. Incorporate it in your process for creating staff development plans. Let your employees know the tasks you will soon pass on to them so they can prepare and build the skills necessary.
• Provide manuals and information guides to equip your team to take on new tasks.  

2. Micromanaging Your Employees

It’s hard to watch your employees make mistakes, especially if you already know how to avoid them and get certain tasks done correctly.  

However, micromanaging your team is demoralizing and counterintuitive.  

Micromanaging is when you try to personally control and monitor your team or a situation. While this can sometimes be useful for small projects, being overly-controlling can be annoying and cause you to lose track of the bigger picture.  

Even though micromanaging is a result of your genuine desire to ensure they succeed, when you closely track and monitor team’s work can create more problems in the long-term.  

It’s not always easy to see whether you’re micromanaging your team or not. To help you identify if you’re doing this bad habit, here are some common traits to look out for:

• You don’t delegate.
• You hate it when your team makes decisions without you.

• You focus on the little details instead of the bigger picture.
• You ignore the experience or opinion of others.
• You want constant updates to make sure your eyes are on everything.
• You’re hard to please when it comes to deliverables.  

This 2023, overcome your obsession to micromanage your employees through a management technique called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

OKRs provides all the useful benefits of micromanagement without the need to closely monitor your employees. It is designed to encourage companies to be transparent and align business goals with individual objectives in a measurable and hierarchical way.  

OKRs have two components: objectives and key results. The objective part defines what your team wants to achieve and the key results fleshes out how each employee is going to go about achieving those goals within a certain time frame.  

3. You’re More Reactive than You Are Proactive

Being reactive means you only respond to unanticipated events after they occur, while being proactive means you anticipate possible challenges and prepare solutions before they even occur.  

As an SEO company in Miami that has worked with countless small business owners and entrepreneurs, the truth is, no company can be proactive in every situation because no one can really anticipate every possible disaster or problem coming their way.  

However, there are things you can do to ensure you provide customers the ultimate experience with your brand and prepare your business to be more effective in dealing with challenges.  

Having a proactive mindset is crucial for entrepreneurs. If your business strategy is more on the reactive side than it is proactive, here are the ten things you can do to shift from being reactive to proactive:

• Identify your core values as an organization. This will serve as your guiding force to help you make sound decisions about growing your company.  

• Get to know your ideal customers. It will allow you to do things that focus on attracting the right people and retaining them for the long haul.  
• Focus on improving your company based on product vision and customer feedback. Listen to what your customers have to say. What are their needs, wants, and preferences? How can you innovate your product offerings to be able to accommodate these demands?
• Use data to predict future trends, inform your marketing efforts, and how to develop your offerings.  
• Set trends according to the data you collect.  
• Focus on the reason why you started your business at first. If it was to help people or whatever personal stuff you cared about, always come back to that when making business growth decisions. For example, Steve Jobs didn't create products based on competitive standards, he created Apple because he didn’ want anything complex or cumbersome.  

• Focus on what makes you unique and be proactive about continuing to promote and develop that key differentiator.  
• Look outside your industry and business to get ideas on how to innovate your products or offerings.  

4. Making Money Your Only Focus

A lot of people start a business to make money. Although you should never neglect your cash flow or profitability because that’s what will make you stay in business, money shouldn’t be your main focus. Studies show that when profit is the main purpose of a company, they’re not as successful as they could be.  

Your objective should be making the best possible product or services possible to help out your intended customers. Solving problems and the unique, valuable ways you solve them is what’s going to make you stand out and thrive.  

Instead of focusing on profit, here are some other things you might want to focus on:

• Business growth and expansion.

• Great customer service.
• Employee satisfaction.
• Developing products and services that are relevant to your intended audience.  

5. No Time Off

A lot of entrepreneurs don’t take time off to make sure their business thrives but doing this will only lead to burnout. Sure, it may seem like the more you work, the more progress you can make. However, working too hard 24/7 will wear you out mentally and physically.  

It robs you of the energy and the mental capacity to do things that will allow you to grow and scale your business. This 2023, make sure you take the time to go on vacation and do something you like.  

As your go-to marketing and SEO company in Miami, don’t be afraid to delegate and take time off from running your business. Your business and future self will thank you for it.  

Looking for The Best Digital Marketing and SEO Company in Miami to Help Your Business Succeed?

If you possess any of these bad business habits, 2023 is the best time to get rid of them. Your New Year’s resolution should be focused around forming new business habits that will propel you forward and getting rid of bad ones that are weighing you down.

Aside from having good business habits, you also need to partner with the best digital marketing and SEO company in Miami to effectively marketing your business to the right people, attract customers, and make your business grow.  

At Digital Resource, our digital marketing specialists and SEO experts will work with you to create a custom plan that will put your business ahead of your competitors and generate the profit you need to grow your business.  

Want to get more customers and make more sales? Contact us today!  

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