The race is on. Hundreds of thousands of Australian entrepreneurs are hoping to make this year a fabulous one for their business. If you want to be one of the few that succeed magnificently, it’s vital you focus on these seven business building strategies.

STOP WASTING SO MUCH TIME ON THINGS THAT DON’T INCREASE INCOME

Shorten the meetings. Don’t take every call. Work away from the office two days a week. Do anything you can to allow you to focus on what really counts – bringing in customers. Time and time again we see entrepreneurs doing busy work all day long, but doing precious little to actually bring in the mulla.

GET SUPER CLEAR ON THE TWO THINGS THAT MOST BRING IN MONEY

Of all the stuff you do in a month, what two activities really bring in money? Sit down and take a few minutes to work out the answer, then write that answer on a sign that you can see all day. That way you’re more likely to keep coming back to those priceless two actions that make you most of your money.

WORK ON MASSIVELY INCREASING YOUR DESIRE

Too many people start coasting and taking it easy once their business is doing okay. Big mistake. Maintaining an attitude of hunger and desire is vital if you want to make your company great. When you have strong desire, you attract more clients. When you have strong desire, you focus more. When you have strong desire, luck tends to go your way. Don’t minimise the importance of personal desire for business success.

INCREASE YOUR INNOVATION

How much new stuff are you trying? Incredibly, a lot of business owners do pretty much the same things for 10 or 20 years! Because they don’t innovate, they keep getting the same mediocre results, year after year.

FOCUS ON OPTIMISATION

Most entrepreneurs do very little optimising. If something is working okay, they tend to just leave it. But you could be making twice as much money if you just started optimising what you’re doing – changing a headline, finessing a sales presentation, improving what your staff say on the phone, etc.

CONSTANTLY ASK: WHAT IS THE HIGHEST AND BEST USE OF MY TIME?

Here is a list of activities that commonly increase the revenue of companies:

• Calling potential customers
• Emailing/mailing potential customers
• Staying in touch with potential customers
• Creating ads to promote what you sell
• Finessing your sales presentation
• Testing different marketing techniques
• Getting PR for your business
• Contacting old customers
• Developing new products and services
• Studying how to grow your business faster
• Improving the performance of key staff
• There are more of course, but if you were doing just the ones above, your company would be making wads of money

WORK OUT YOUR TIME TRAPS

What are the low value things you are doing that are taking up much of the day? And who are the people who are stealing your valuable hours? Together these constitute your time traps that are reducing your income, slowing your business down and limiting how wealthy and successful you become in your life.

• How can you stop certain people interrupting you?
• How can you reduce average meeting times?
• Can you schedule an amount of time each day to focus on what’s really going to move the needle for your company?
• Can you do your email in two or three blocks each day?
• Only when you make new rules and restructure your week so that you’re spending large amounts of time on truly important activities, will you take your company to the next level and start making really big money.