5 Business Habits Hurting Your Bottom Line
For many creatives, the expertise they need to manage a company doesn’t come naturally. Most designers want to spend their working hours playing with color and texture, not staring at spreadsheets. Los Angeles–based designer Oliver Furth, who launched his practice in 2006, tells AD PRO that for him, business tasks can often feel like a mismatch with his skills. “Designers are creative people, and forcing ourselves into the business world is a square-peg, round-hole situation.” If your profit and loss statements regularly dip into the red no matter how much you hustle, then it may be time to take a critical look at your own patterns. Barbara Corcoran, founder of The Corcoran Group and judge on ABC’s Shark Tank, says, “Everyone in any business feels like they get stuck—it’s called a funk.” So, how do you get back on track? Furth and Corcoran say you should start by making sure you’re not guilty of these bad habits that could be stalling your business and hurting your bottom line:
1. You don’t delegate
Once upon a time, you may have been able to wear all the hats, but as a company grows, it gets harder and harder to keep up. Furth felt this pressure in the early days of his career. “When I first started my firm, I wanted to do everything myself: I went to the bank, shopped for fabric, met with clients, and dealt with a slew of vendors—but I soon realized that was not practical or efficient.”
Creative people, especially, often have trouble trusting anyone else to do the job, which can stifle growth, says Corcoran. “It’s an Achilles heel: the more creative you are, the less you delegate—that’s why you get these phenomenally creative people who can’t build a big business.”
So, how should you decide what to keep on your plate and what to hand off to an employee? Furth says it’s about looking critically at yourself. “The most important thing is to know your strengths and weaknesses and play to them,” he says. “[Delegating] keeps my mind freer to do the tasks I’m better at.” Corcoran agrees that doing what you do best, and skipping the rest, is key. “There’s a philosophy that entrepreneurs have to be everything to everybody,” she shares. “That it’s good for them to learn to do things they don’t do well. Forget it! Do what you do well, and do a lot more of it, and you wind up a success.”
2. You regularly burn out
Every entrepreneur knows they’ll need to work hard to be successful, but they tend to forget that work habits also need to be sustainable long-term. Thinking back to the early years of running her business, Corcoran says, “A prerequisite to succeeding in anything is outworking the next guy, but I worked myself to the bone.” Her brilliant solution to prevent burnout? Regular, pre-planned vacations. “I started vacationing one week every two months,” she says. “Then I moved it up to two weeks every two months, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
She doesn’t always know where she’ll travel, if at all, but sitting down twice a year and building vacation time into her calendar forces her to create a more balanced life. It also makes her work more effective when she’s not on vacation. “No matter how hard I’m asked to work, I always feel like ‘I’m almost there’ and it gives me energy.”
Her philosophy: “If you’re going to outwork everybody, you should out-vacation them as well.”
3. You don’t prioritize your relationships
No small business can survive in a vacuum, but when entrepreneurs have so much to do day-to-day, nurturing relationships often gets pushed to the end of the list; Furth says it shouldn’t. Community involvement is essential to growing a business. His advice is simple: Show up. “Being part of the community wouldn’t have happened without attending industry events, parties, openings, lectures,” Furth explains. “I always encourage young designers to go to events, even if it’s for a few minutes. Support your colleagues.”
The same goes for company culture. Corcoran says the energy she spends treating her staff to fun perks around the office—shoe shines, desk massages, parties—pays off in spades and leads to happier employees who work harder. “My sales agents, my support staff, my managers, those are the only people I worry about. I never worry about clients. If I spoil the people in my company, they spoil their people, and it rolls right down the pipe every time.”
4. You don’t know where your profits come from
You may think it’s obvious how you make money, but are you seeing the whole picture? Corcoran says very few entrepreneurs take the time to get crystal clear about their cash flow. “People don’t sit down and size up where their business comes from,” she says. “It’s never where they think.”
Skip this exercise and you won’t be able to make smart decisions about how to maximize your time and allocate your energy moving forward. “Make a list,” Corcoran says. “If 75 percent of your business came from that one trade show, go sign up for three trade shows right now—that’s where most of your work is coming from.”
5. You forget to have fun
If your work days feel stale and repetitive, you can bet your staff is feeling the same. To inspire yourself and your team, keep it light. “Make sure you have fun at work,” says Corcoran. “It’s the most underutilized card in business.”
Remember, there’s more than one way to accomplish goals. “It’s very hard to get good ideas at work if you’re sitting around a conference table. No, thank you,” says Corcoran. Her favorite strategy? Add fun. “Call off the manager meeting and say, ‘We’re going to the movies.’ March everybody down the street and. . .during the walk from the movie theater, four blocks away, back to the office, you’ll get four valid ideas and [more] enthusiasm. . .than if you’d sat at the table for two hours.”
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