No time to build your business? Do this!

Think you have no time to build a business? Think again! Building your creative business is possible for you! By following steps that I used to grow my creative business, you’ll see it’s possible! Even if you THINK you don’t have enough time. Read No time to build your business? Do this!, and thank me later 🙂

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From Busy to Committed : Building Your Business with Intention

If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you might have seen a post about my full time job. I mentioned that because of my 9-5, my business probably hasn’t grown as quickly as I’d like it to. That’s when I got a comment from a wonderful woman who felt encouraged because she too feels this way. Between the commute, her job, and all the other things in life, she felt like she had NO time to build her business!

Let’s be honest here. There are not a lot of people that I know that have a lot of extra time. None of us seem to have enough time. No matter what age we are, no matter our jobs (or lack thereof), and no matter our circumstances. One thing remains the same – we just don’t have enough time.

No Time to Build Your Business? Here’s How to Make It Happen!

Even though there’s so little time, there are so many things we’d all like to be doing. For example, I’d be interested in learning to play tennis, learning calligraphy on an iPad, rebounding on a trampoline, or enrolling in an adult dance class. However, I’ve never really consciously intended to make those things a reality in my life. If I had, I’d be doing them.

For example, I’ve recently made a commitment to make YouTube videos every week until the end of this year. I could have said, “I might make these videos.” And if I didn’t set the intention to make consistent videos, then guess what? I wouldn’t do it. Why? Because it takes a lot of work to make a video. I have to script it out, I have to get out the recording equipment, I have to make sure I look halfway presentable, and then I have to record it. It’s a lot of work. So honestly, if I were just interested in it, I would simply pass on doing it. But I made the intention, so here I am.

So that’s the first thing we want to do when we don’t think we have enough time to create our businesses. Set an intention. It’s not enough to just flip through Instagram or YouTube. We say, “that lady’s making 100K on printables, that sounds fun. I might be interested in that.” No. Being interested will not get you there. Being committed, however, will get you there. When you intend to create something – you consciously place your thoughts on a goal. You stop being interested, and you start being committed.

The Impact of Small Choices on Business Success

The rest of the steps in this formula for building your business quickly come from a book I love, The Compound Effect, by Darren Hardy. He proposes that the next step to reaching your goals is to focus on your choices.

The idea behind your choices is that they often seem small and insignificant when you’re making them. A minute here, an hour there. But what The Compound Effect presents is those tiny, seemingly minuscule choices that will ultimately make or break if we reach our goals. In Darren Hardy’s book, he tells us that it’s not so much that we’re making the WRONG decisions. We aren’t consciously sitting there and making the decision to not work toward our goals. It’s more that we’re completely asleep to the fact that we could be making different choices to make progress.

Recognizing the Power of Every Step Forward

So let me tell you how this might show up for you. As a business coach, I see beginner business owners making this mistake regarding their choices. We get stuck when there’s SO much to do in the beginning. They make the choice not to move forward at all because it seems like there are too many steps in front of them. They could take the first step—like designing their first product, starting their blog, or writing that book—but the second, third, or fifth step is the one that scares them—like listing their product, starting their website, or getting that book published—so why bother taking the first step?

So we decide to stay exactly where we are. They don’t make any progress or move forward. That choice is costing people. And again, most people don’t see this as a choice, right? They see it as something that’s out of their control. Therefore, they feel forced to make the choice not to move forward.

We have to realize that these choices, however small they might feel, have gotten us to exactly where we are right now. So the question is, how are you choosing to spend your time? Realize that every single choice you make—especially about how you spend your time—will alter your life.

The Power of Daily Habits for Business Success

That brings us to the next step. Once you realize that you can make small choices that lead to an entirely different life, the key isn’t to make those different choices every once in a while; the key is to make those choices daily. And these are what are called our habits. Now, like you, I started my business feeling like I was starting from zero. Which I was. But I made the choice to use my time to make small steps in my business. Kinda like me filming this video each week.

When I first started my party decorations business, I loved to write, so I wanted to make one blog a week. Was it doing anything for my business at the time? Not really. Some days I wondered if it was a complete waste of time. But I made it a habit in my business because I knew that by making the choice to blog each and every week – making it a habit – it would bring me the goal that I wanted.

How Small Choices Lead to Momentum

As a little foreshadowing, just the other day, I received a deposit in my bank account from just one of my affiliates for over $1100, which is a direct result of my blogging efforts.

You see, habits are simply making the choices that we talked about earlier – a routine thing in your life. So, if you know that creating a few products a week, writing a few pages a day, or filming one YouTube video a week is getting you closer to your goals, then it only makes sense to do it on a more frequent and regular basis. But the problem is that when we don’t see immediate results, it’s sometimes hard to keep a habit. So we wonder, am I wasting this precious time?

The answer is no, because it brings us to our next step, which comes after the intention you set, after the choices that you make, and after the habits that you build. And that is momentum.

How Momentum Builds Over Time

The answer is no, because it brings us to our next step, which comes after the intention you set, after the choices that you make, and after the habits that you build. And that is momentum.

In The Compound Effect, the author talks about how hard it is to develop good habits because we often opt for instant gratification instead of sticking to the plan that will get us to our goals. That’s why we often scroll Instagram reels instead of, I don’t know, recording a YouTube video, listing a new product, or emailing our audience. If we did any one of those things just one time and instantly made $1000, it wouldn’t be hard at all to make the choice to do those things every single day. But because there is delayed gratification with reaching our goals, we often can’t see how our choices and habits impact us in the long term.

What we don’t see is the momentum that’s building up every time we take one of these actions in our business. So, even though our actions might be very small choices, when we make them over and over for a period of time, one day, we start to see results. And that is because all of these little steps that didn’t really take us that much time at all add up and start to gain momentum.

Unlocking Success: The Power of Small Steps Over Time

Now, when I first started blogging, did I feel like it was a waste of time? Sometimes! Did it take some time for me to set it up? Yes, but because it was just a small thing each week, it didn’t feel like such a huge undertaking. Did it grow as fast as some other business owners who didn’t have a full-time job, a kid, and a million other responsibilities? No. The only reason I’m where I am now is because I did small things over time.

Tony Robbins says that people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10.

So, my friend, what I’m telling you is that you don’t need a ton of time in the short term. You need to finally decide what you want to create and then make choices to develop habits that will build momentum to get you to where you want to be.

I have a free worksheet that will help you break this strategy down so you can make this business a reality. Let me be clear. It’s not about overnight success. Instead of viewing time as your enemy, realize that it is time that will be your strongest asset because your efforts amplify over time, allowing your actions to compound and build wealth over the long term.