How to build a profitable small business by putting yourself first

As a small business owner, you face a world of challenges. But you’ve made it this far, and if there’s anyone that can keep driving profitability, it’s you.

Sometimes, you just need a little guidance to figure out what to prioritise and when.

This can be difficult when you’re busy fighting fires, so we’ve put together a very straightforward e-book that breaks your journey into three stages.

In this article, we pull out some of the highlights:

• About the Mind over minutes e-book
• Develop a growth mindset
• Build a productive growth culture
• Activate your growth strategy with tech
• Final thoughts

About the Mind over minutes e-book

In Mind over minutes, we provide practical guidance on how to keep profitability on track for your small business in the face of mounting adversity.

You might be facing global challenges—such as rising energy costs and shifting economies, or ones specific to you—like key people leaving or losing your biggest customer.  

Whatever you’re up against, we’ve broken down the path to profitability into three stages, each giving you a key takeaway and clear action to complete after reading.

This will help you take a proactive approach to growth at a time where many businesses might be going on the defensive.

Here’s a quick overview of each stage.

Develop a growth mindset

The path to productivity and profitability starts with you. As a human being, not as a business owner. So, in this chapter, we recommend you start developing a growth mindset.

What is a growth mindset?

The belief that talent is something that can be developed rather than a fixed innate gift. Those with a growth mindset achieve more by pursuing continuous learning, collaborating with others, and being willing to take risks.

There are three practices you’ll need to think about when building this mindset:

1. Make your own health your top priority.
2. Proactively pursue personal growth.
3. Set high goals and allow yourself to fail.

Dig into these and you’ll build a foundation to confidently execute the strategies that will help your business thrive.

Build a productive growth culture

Next, you’re going to need to push your ambition outwards to your people. This means embedding growth and a productive culture into your business, so your people can achieve more, perform better, and get more satisfaction from their work.

Once again, there are three ways to do this:

1. Spend time and actually listen to your people.
2. Help your team find balance and support them in achieving what you did in the first stage (develop a growth mindset).
3. Knock down barriers to their productivity and empower them through automation.

Giving your people more time and space shifts their mentality away from fear and towards growth, which is vital for profitability.

Activate your growth strategy with tech

The final stage is to create growth strategies and activate them with technology. This is how the mindset you’ve developed and culture you’ve built are put into action.

By collaborating with your team to devise the right plans and put the tools in place to execute them, you’ll start to bring your growth ambitions to life.

You guessed it, there are three strategies to focus on:

1. Build a clear and actionable growth plan with your team.
2. Create processes and systems that serve your people.
3. Perfect the fundamentals of your business.

Use these as a starting point and you’ll see a positive impact to your profitability over time.

Final thoughts

This article gives you a taster of what’s in the Mind over minutes e-book, but the parts you’ll get the most out of are the key takeaways and clear actions at the end of each stage.

Because educating yourself without action will only get you so far.

You need to put what you learn into practice to achieve a real-world result. Get the Mind over minutes e-book today and start making changes.