How To Maintain Your Drive And Keep Making Your Business A Success

When you started your business journey, you surely had a summit in mind. A peak that seemed far out of reach at the time — but not outright unreachable. As you grew your nascent operation, learning lessons and overcoming obstacles, you noticed that summit slowly but surely moving into view.

Eventually, after committing so much energy for so long, you looked down and made a startling discovery. You’d done it. You’d scaled that summit. You’d conquered your goal.

Unfortunately, you never put any thought into what would happen at that point. You didn’t really expect to get there, so you didn’t have a reason to plan beyond it. And now you’re at a loss. You’ve done what you set out to do and found yourself lacking a purpose.

You see two paths ahead of you: one of persistence, and one of capitulation. You could keep trying to push on, or you could accept your success and essentially start getting ready for retirement.

Now, while retirement does have some things going for it, you should know one thing: it doesn’t suit that many people, and it particularly doesn’t suit entrepreneurial types. They need to be challenged. They love the journey of battling to overcome the odds. But what if you find that your drive is waning despite your inclination to continue?

In this post, we’re going to cover some tips that can help you maintain (or renew) your drive to succeed in business, giving you fresh impetus to protect everything you’ve built and identify new summits that you can work towards. Let’s get to them, shall we?

Pick a new faraway mountain to climb#

By far the best way to put the spark back in your business is to set a new unlikely goal to work towards. After all, there’s always somewhere else to go. Cornered the market in your area? What about going beyond your area?

Or maybe you could move into a new niche altogether, expanding the purview of your company. The trick is to find a goal that’s sufficiently far to be exciting and intimidating but not so distant that you can’t see how you’d ever reach it.

Remember that you need to genuinely want to get there. It can’t be wholly arbitrary: you can pick a goal at random and assert that you’ll make it there, but you’ll inevitably give up when you reach the point of doing something high-effort like planning a promotional event.

So think carefully about why you chose your original goal, and what you’d sincerely like to accomplish in the future. What would you like to be remembered for?

Boost efficiency to free up your time#

One thing that can reduce your entrepreneurial drive is trying to keep your established processes going. It’s one thing to accept long hours and tough situations when you’re pushing towards a goal, but it’s another to do so once you’ve made it there.

All the inefficiencies can start to wear on you and leave you feeling that protecting what you’ve built will ultimately sap all your creative energy. It’s a dispiriting situation.

So why not aim to enhance the operation you’ve created, making it easier to hit your existing targets and freeing up time to put towards captivating new objectives? Consider how something ostensibly simple like pricing can soak up time, with hours going towards researching the competition, tweaking margins, and defining sales conditions.

If that sounds familiar, you should try setting up dynamic pricing for your products (or, if you sell subscriptions instead of typical products, configuring a subscription ecommerce platform to scale your strategy).

Heck — if you’ve got the budget, you could even make a few new hires. Even if you’re in an extremely niche sector requiring applicants with particular skills, the new age of remote work means finding candidates has never been easier. Need a product designer with an intimate knowledge of the American market? Hire in Texas.

Require a customer service representative who’s fluent in French? Recruit in Paris. If you can afford a few new employees, it’s an option worth considering — especially if you value your own free time!

Focus on your role as a mentor#

When you start out as an entrepreneur, your focus is on what you can accomplish. You want to add to your skills and prove what you can do. But once you’ve built a successful business, you can take your foot off the gas and consider something else: namely the development of your employees. What can they achieve? Where could they take your business in the coming years?

Stepping back a little and acting more as a mentor can radically change your perspective, giving you back some of that early hunger. It’s the same reason why elite sportspeople often go into coaching after they’ve retired. And since you’re working to train people who represent your company, all your minor victories will serve to strengthen your brand.

Invest in a complete brand refresh#

Speaking of your brand, the fact that you’ve established a successful operation doesn’t mean you’ve made everything perfect. Sometimes the most engaging thing you can do is tear down a large part of what you’ve built and start again — and you can do just that with your brand without affecting the fundamental workings of your business.

Could you use a new logo? A different slogan? A rethought color palette? You can work on all of this (and the associated marketing strategy) while your business is completely open, roll out your refresh when you’re ready, then accept the consequences.

If it works, you can pursue new horizons and woo potential customers — and if it doesn’t, you can learn from that situation and revert to your previous brand (much as Coca-Cola did after the disastrous New Coke launch).

Work on your life outside business#

Lastly, it’s vital to remember that people crave contrast. They want — they need — to experience shifting circumstances, and they stagnate when contrast dries up. Think about the difference between the first week of unemployment after being fired and the tenth week.

The first is delightful, giving you opportunities to do all the things you couldn’t do while you were working. The tenth is miserable: by then, you’ve grown bored of all the free time.

Due to this, you can lose your entrepreneurial drive because you’ve grown sick of the grind. And when that happens, the way to get it back is to work on things outside of business. Aim to get fitter, learn a new skill, improve your social life, or take up an unusual hobby.

Do something to get your attention off work, then come back to the office (literally or metaphorically) with a renewed eagerness to excel professionally.