Perseverance & Inner Motivation Will Drive Your Business Forward

If you owned a business in 2020, regardless of size or stage, you’ve just experienced an impactful year. Whether your bottom line is up (congratulations!), flat or on a downward curve, the year we’ve just gone through gave a whole new meaning to the expression “out of the box” thinking.

2021 is here and other than a calendar flip, not much has really changed yet.

So, what do we do now?

As business owners, we understand that the best success in 2021 will come from embracing, (not fighting against) the realities of our current world (COVID continues) and from finding new and potentially unique opportunities to move our businesses forward and keep ourselves and our teams on track.

We also know that 2021 is going to take the same amount of perseverance and inner motivation as the last 10 months has taken, maybe more.

There’s a great quote of unknown origin that says “You have been assigned this mountain to show others it can be moved”

As entrepreneurs, business owners and leaders of teams, 2021 is our mountain.

Where do we start?

First, take a deep breath, sit back and remind yourself of your vision and your passions. Tap into your well of inner motivation, the one that drove you to start your business in the first place. Review your business plan. Remember your WHY. Then, start to move your mountain.

This is how business owners react to challenges. It’s in our DNA.

We take action while others talk about it. We reset our mindset and steel our resolve. We look for and find new opportunities to do business. We explore mutually beneficial strategic partnerships that allow us to expand our brand and offering to new audiences and create new revenue streams. We get clarity. We get creative. We innovate. We act.

We move mountains.

As a career entrepreneur and business coach, I’ve led companies through 3 major recessions. When the pandemic lockdown began last March and contracts were put on hold, my business partner and I knew we needed a plan. Like everyone else, “needing a plan” was in fact, the only thing we knew. So much uncertainty but we still had to act. Not react but act. Doing nothing would sink us.

We inherently understood that attracting “new” customers would be tough for a while. Diving deeper with our existing clientele and finding new and additional ways to provide value was our first step.

We also knew that collaboration is key in times of economic uncertainty so we created four unique strategic partnerships that did everything from webinars to instructor led e-learning to masterminds for women in business.

We kept learning by attending multiple online workshops. We studied economic history, listened to TED Talks and sat on business panels. We read and wrote and researched.

Most importantly, we prioritized planting seeds.

Despite what social media would like you to believe, business isn’t about instant wins and quick results. Consistent, strategic prospecting and persistent nurturing of relationships is the way to get the best results in the long term. We needed to get through 2020 and also ensure our 2021. So in addition to all of the above, we connected with as many business people, friends, colleagues and industry experts that we could find. We worked our LinkedIn connections and spent a lot of time on Zoom. A lot.

We also took our own advice and reached out to other business coaches for an outside perspective. As coaches and business owner’s ourselves, we absolutely understood the value and critical importance of getting feedback from those who were on the outside looking in. What did they think the “new economy” would look like? What could we do better as a business? Where do we look for opportunities? What new initiatives can we create? What digital tools and automation could we implement? How did our marketing language and tone need to shift?

We learned and listened and planned and when we put it all together, 2020 was one of our best years yet.

Was it exhausting? Yes. Different? Yes. Stressful? Yes. Did we know it was going to be okay? Of course not.

But what we did know was that perseverance, resilience and mindset would get us through regardless of outcome. We held a belief in our vision and we tapped into our personal resilience over and over and over again. We accepted the realities of what was happening and found new ways to stand, as a business and as coaches, shifts that were equally challenging as they were empowering.

2021 is here and we’re going to have to do it all over again.

Will you choose to be challenged or empowered?

Persevere. Lean in. Level up. Grow. Embrace the uncertainty.

It’s what business owners do.

How can we help?