What business do you have? Are you sure of it? In my experience as an entrepreneur for 22 years and coaching for close to 10 years, you need the right processes and thinking in the right business. Otherwise it could cost you a lot of money and possibly lead to failure.

Let’s look at what businesses you have. If you are an entrepreneur, you have a 90% chance of being a micro business. To learn more about a micro business, follow this link to our previous blog post.

A micro-business is 10 or fewer people with annual revenues below $300,000. With that definition, you realise most businesses are micro-businesses.

I’ve met many people who say, “Oh, I’m a small business person.” I’ll ask, “How many people do you employ?”
“Five.”
“And what’re your annual revenues?”
“$200,000.”

Small businesses are defined as 10 or 11 to 50 employees. Medium businesses are 50 to 500, depending on which country you are in.

Why is this important that you, know what business you are in? Because I focus a lot on micro-businesses, I’m the zero-to-one guy. The thinking, mindset and processes that you follow in a micro business are completely different from the thinking mindset and processes that you run in a small business. But if you look at most of the training programs, the books and the speakers are focused on small or medium-sized businesses, and they don’t work for micro-businesses.

If you’ve miscategorised your business, you’ll think certain processes should be in place. You should have certain software in place. And then you, as a micro-business owner, trying to check all those boxes will topple over. Because the important things for micro-business owners are not external, they’re internal. Success comes from shifting the mindset.

If you don’t get the mindset in your rhythm of success right in the microphase, it’s going to fail when you expand to a small business. You need to set up the processes, a skeleton, create the beast, raise the baby so that it can stand on its own two feet, and start working for you.

If you ever had children, the first phase of business creation is similar to infancy. It’s the dirty nappy, burping and vomiting phase, and things go wrong quickly in this phase, and that’s where the mindset needs to be ready. You need to get your processes in place.

When starting a microbusiness, it needs to run with PostIt notes. It’s not going to be very fancy because if you solidify systems before you’ve dealt with the realities of the market, you’ll be less free to adapt on the fly. Instead of adapting, you’ll be bogged down in remaking processes. Being flexible is key, so it needs to be a foundation of your rhythm of success.

How do you measure the success of your micro business? Ask yourself these questions:
#1. Is it repeatable?
#2. Do I have the right strategies in place?
#3. And also, what is my mindset?

You have to fix the mindset now, so it’s ready when you get to 10 or more people. At this point, your mindset should be specific, “Not everything is my fault, but 100% of everything is my responsibility.”