Working IN vs ON your business. What does that even mean?

What does it mean and what's the difference?

Working in your business achieves results for your clients

Working on your business achieves results for yourself and your clients

If you want to achieve sustainable long term results for you business you'll need to do both.

Here's a task to do, start a journal and record everything you do for a week and then categorize everything into either "in" or "on" your business.

Here's some ideas that might help;

Working IN your business

• Seeing clients
• Writing programs
• Answering queries
• Paying invoices
• Invoicing Clients
• Scheduling Clients
• Fighting fires (dealing with crises)

Working ON your business

• Education - podcasts, blogs (about business)
• Creating systems (technical and non-technical)
• Planning for the future
• Setting goals
• Measuring success
• Automating processes
• Creating Marketing copy
• Writing content blogs/articles/tips
• Talking with mentors

I know from experience how easy it is to just work IN your business for weeks and weeks and even months without doing anything to work ON your business. For me this happened because I was running my business in a re-active way instead of a proactive way. Every day stuff happens so you deal with that stuff and if you aren't very careful the day will end without achieving much at all to help your business move forward.

The key is planning. You need to schedule time that you will spend on your business every single day. You need to prioritise this time and not allow yourself to be distracted. It's also about focus, working on your business is hard so you need to put 100% focus into it. It's just like training if you plan then you focus you will get results.

It doesn't take much to get started, even 30 minutes a day to begin with to get into the habit. The great thing about working ON your business is that very quickly it will making working IN your business a lot easier and more rewarding.

I'm planning a future blog about some techniques to help with focusing on tasks but for now have a read about the Pomodoro technique which would be awesome to help you get started. It basically involves selecting tasks that can be achieved typically within 25 minute blocks and then working on those without distraction, then take a 5 minute break and start again. Sounds simple but you'd be surprised how effective the technique is.

For other awesome tools to help you grow your fitness or coaching business head over to the Training Tilt website. Training Tilt is a community and e-commerce platform built specifically for fitness professionals.