Business rituals that will pay off forever
"RITUALS" what do you think about it when you heard the word?
You might relate it with lighting the candles, chanting or sacraments. But the rituals I speak of are the business rituals. These rituals are don't have to be spiritual or religious or esoteric.
Rituals are the repetitive sequences of activities that express and reinforce the key values of the organisation. Rituals create a culture in your business which is formed over the time.
A business card! Well, it's a sort of tradition or a ritual. Business rituals make you stronger through the business grief. The rituals of business developed with the type of organisation. The most creative organisations prioritise rituals by doing; the least creative organisations prioritise rituals of saying.
But don't forget to balance the daily rituals with tech change because overusing of the rituals makes them pointless and lifeless. Some rituals will last for a year, or some rituals are last for a week only. It's better to create a ritual with an expiry date.
5 Rituals of small business success
Running a small business is unpredictable. But what if your business is going in a wrong direction? Even though you do your best but still things don't improve.
Do not worry; business rituals can help you to move from one level to another in the right direction. These business rituals are the learning mechanisms which create the core values and organisational culture.
Ritual#1 Motivation
Staying motivated every day can be tough even if with the work that pushes and challenges you. Keep yourself fully alive, and present is an art. Motivation is not that easy to manage. But tiny rituals can be helpful.
The tiny daily rituals are the habits that keep you motivated over the long haul. Tiny rituals are not a big deal as they are not judged. They do not require participation in all 30 days challenges; you can skip a day or 17.
You need to establish a daily progress ritual, take a minute at the end of the day and jot down whatever you accomplished.
Also Read: 10 Reality Checks which would Hit you in the Face in the Entrepreneurial Journey!
Ritual#2 Virtual Mentor
Having a mentor has always helped with business development. To spark ideation, we require information from some areas; that is why we need to have multiple mentors with various domains expertise.
You might surround by many mentors in person. But over time you will find it much harder to say no to their advice and sometimes trust their advice because it may not work in every field.
The virtual approach is better than the having mentors in person. Curate them which ones you follow online regularly. The good thing is that the best experts in many domains are available via internet or KM (knowledge management) system.
Ritual#3 Filtering noise
You need filters for the things which create noise. Procedural filters, personal standard filters, system filters can filter the noise created by the information overload, feedback, feature requests, complaints.
The best 20% of the efforts should get the 80% of the result that means 80 percent of your output come from only 20 percent of your inputs. For instance, if we take feedback through email, phone, social media or in-app support tickets. We need to stop few of them because that will impact the only 20 percent of the inputs. This way you can free up yourselves to work on something important.
Ritual#4 Hundred people
Whenever you see a successful business person, you can only see the public glories. But actually, they have a list of 100 ultra-productive people to dedicate their most of the time with.
The successful people know that it's critical to manage the lots of relationships and there is nothing more valuable than time. This ritual can help you to manage the time for your deep work and maximise the success rate.
Ritual#5 Create and sustain powerful rituals
Pen down the things what works and what not works in your business. I am sure you will have a number of things in your 'not working list' that is backed up by some ritualistic behaviour. Break the top ones right now by replacing or removing it. Your habits are there to satiate yourself in the short time.
All you need to do is swap the habits with the working ones. Although it's much easy to take advantage of the existing rituals than to establish the new ones.
