The Employee Worker Mentality / Busy Bee Syndrome That Will Kill Your?Business

The Hustle Trap Keeps Many Smart, Hardworking Professionals From Growing Their Businesses/Producing Honey

Welcome to The Solopreneur MBA, my weekly newsletter to help coaches, consultants, and solopreneurs build online businesses they love. My name is Krista and I have made it my professional and personal mission to help entrepreneurs overcome the roadblocks holding them back from success and ultimately help them to achieve their business dreams. Thanks in advance for reading the latest newsletter edition. Hit the ‘Subscribe’ button to support this channel and share this newsletter with friends, family, clients, or entrepreneur friends! Enjoy!

Just like a bee hive, a business has one focus: to produce honey. Yet unlike bees who are super organized, team-oriented, and hyper-focused, single-member business owners often do anything and everything for hours, weeks, months, and sometimes year on end, except producing honey. In my analogy, honey would be business growth, increased revenue, and generally what we label ‘success’.

If you want to learn the key mistake and how to fix it, keep reading.?

The Classic Mistake: Entrepreneur vs. Employee Mentality

Business has two distinct areas of work:

Thinking

Goal setting and strategy (the things that move your business forward)

Doing

Execution and completion (the manual tasks that need to be done by someone, but not necessarily you)

Many new single-member business owners spend all their time on the Doing and not enough on the Thinking. As a business coach, I see entrepreneurs’ biggest challenge: where to focus their attention.

The reason is that they have most likely been an employee a lot longer than they have been an entrepreneur. This means they were conditioned not to think because the employer thinks for you. You are not encouraged to deviate from your tasks. In fact, you can even get fired for it. As an employee, you are the Doer. Being a good employee means being excellent at doing and following directions.

Entrepreneurship doesn’t translate at all from being an employee. You can’t simply work hard and be ok. When professionals decide to go into business for themselves as independent consultants, coaches, or service experts, figuring out their priorities is one of the most challenging tasks they will face. New entrepreneurs who have a “busy bee” employee mentality fail. You must unlearn everything that made you a good employee.

As an entrepreneur, it is precisely the opposite: we are Thinkers (or Queen Bees).

We need time to think, dream, plan, and be creative. I call it “white space”. A queen bee in a hive has no distractions. Instead, she focuses entirely on one critical and specific task: producing eggs. All other To Dos are delegated to the worker bees.

The To-Do list, social media, futile networking, and other shiny objects are deadly for business growth.

If they don’t hire a business coach who teaches them how to prioritize and organize their day, this problem will sooner or later be fatal to their business.

The queen bee has the most critical job in the colony. Without her, the colony would die. Yet, she is also entirely dependent on the worker bees, and if she doesn’t perform, they replace her. This is an excellent analogy for a company. Even Steve Jobs was replaced from his company, Apple, for several years.

As a business owner, you are the queen bee. You hire others to be the worker bees / doers. You can also automate many tasks. You don’t always need to have your own team. You can outsource and find qualified contractors to do the work. Later, if you hire in-house, it is your choice.

Don’t get lost in a field of flowers (or weeds): learn how to prioritize and follow a clearly defined business strategy. That is the way to get the honey and not starve.

The Queen Bee And Time Management

In the book, Clockwork , entrepreneur and author Michael Michalowicz talks about the bee hive and the role of the queen bee. As a solopreneur, it can be particularly difficult to separate oneself from wearing all the hats. This book is full of valuable tips and strategies to do just that. One activity from his book that I particularly like, besides tracking ALL your time, is this:

1. Write down your big promise. This is the “one thing” that is the core of your business.

2. Write all your weekly activities on sticky notes.

3. Which one is the most important and best supports your big promise? Remove all the others. You will focus on the most important task and delegate, delete, or defer all the other sticky notes. Now you know exactly what the worker bees should be doing.?

Strategy Always Comes?First

One of my favorite quotes is from Abraham Lincoln, who said:

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the?axe.”

The danger that is all too common is how easy it is to want to jump in to doing without first crafting a solid business plan. Don’t confound a To-Do list filled of tasks with actual business goals. The consequences of ignoring strategy and having the wrong priorities are severe: entrepreneurs burning out, not getting the sales they want, and sacrificing months, if not years, “trying” to build a business only to see very little progress, running out of money, putting stress on the family, and even be forced back into getting a job. I know because I have coached entrepreneurs suffering from all of the above. News flash: If your business doesn’t sustain you and your family, it is a side hustle or a hobby, not a business.

For the past four years, I have taught service-based business owners how to achieve results. It all begins with a business plan and a solid business strategy. An entrepreneur must learn to be efficient and productive. While you need both, efficiency is always more important because you can be highly productive…on the wrong tasks.?

Below are three efficiency strategies to stop the hustle once and for all. But before you follow any of them, make sure you have a business plan written together with a qualified business coach. Strategy is everything. Without it, you are nothing and you will get nowhere. No great business operates purely on luck.

Efficiency Hack 1: The 5/25?Rule?

Warren Buffet famously asked his private pilot to list his 25 top business goals. Then he instructed him to circle the five top ones. He then proceeded to tell his pilot to avoid the twenty secondary goals at all costs and focus 100% of his energy to the top five. This later became known as the 5/25 rule. Focus on only the top 5 goals and ignore the rest! I love teaching this simple yet highly effective strategy. Try it out, and let me know how it worked for you.

Efficiency Hack 2: The Eisenhower Matrix

Named after the late American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, this productivity hack is one of my favorites. Widely considered one of the most productive presidents the U.S.A. ever had, we can learn a thing or two by following his methods. The Eisenhower Matrix (which I like to call the 4 D’s) is a tool to help set priorities. The matrix is designed to move tasks into four areas:

1. Urgent and important (tasks you will do).
2. Important, but not urgent (tasks you will defer).
3. Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate).
4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will delete).

Download my free worksheet to plan your tasks using the Eisenhower Matrix. This is part of my Time Management course for entrepreneurs.

GET YOUR FREE WORKSHEET HERE

Efficiency Hack 3: Rockefeller’s Top 3 Success?Rules?

John Rockefeller was a self-made entrepreneur, the founder of Standard Oil, and known as the wealthiest man in modern history. He became America’s first billionaire in 1916.

In the book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish , the author discusses three essential habits that make Rockefeller the richest American in all of U.S. history. Rockefeller’s three guiding principles are:

Priorities

Like Gary Keller’s modern book, The One Thing, Rockefeller believed that less is more in business. He said to look for the top thing that would move your business forward in the immediate future, then prioritize accordingly. I call this “the mission and vision”. Everyone in the company should be focused on the business mission, like in a bee colony all the bees focus on honey production. It is the only way to do business!

Data

You are headed straight for failure if you aren’t monitoring data in your business. Rockefeller spoke of the importance of daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly tracking. He ran his company strongly around data long before the computer era. I teach OKRs, Scorecards, and KPIs in your business inside my signature business coaching program, The Solopreneur MBA .

Rhythm

Meetings are an unnecessary evil, but when done right, they are one of the most potent tools for productivity. Here are the three types of meetings that move my business forward:?

a) Annual Planning Meeting Every September (Full Day)

b) Quarterly Planning 2 weeks before the beginning of a new quarter (Full Day)

c) Weekly check-ins (30–90 Minutes)

As a solopreneur, these three meetings are enough for me. If you have a team, you may find up to six meeting types to be beneficial.?

Also, I feel one must learn how to run a productive meeting , as in many companies, they are poorly organized, too long, and have little benefit.?

If you read books about the most successful companies, they all have strong opinions about meetings and a well-defined frequency and agenda as to what each meeting should accomplish.

Conclusion

You won't get far if you don’t know what to focus on in your business.

Even if you think you know, there is more work to be done, namely learning to prioritize and plan your day, week, month, quarter, and year.

Need More?Help??

If you need more help with this, I’d like to share a few ways I can help:

Check out my course, Strategize: Time Management + Productivity for Solopreneurs .

Apply to work with me either 1:1 or in one of many programs designed for entrepreneurs who want to scale.

Join my book club for entrepreneurs , where we read great books like the ones I mentioned in this article and many more!

Download my free worksheet to plan your tasks using the Eisenhower Matrix. This is part of my Time Management course for entrepreneurs.

Are You Growing an Online Business, Interested in Monetizing Your Content, or Trying to Build Influence in Your Niche? Then I Invite You to Join 31,000+ Subscribers Who Receive My Weekly Tips?Here .