Business Owner Mindset

If you’re struggling to make your entrepreneurial dreams come true, it may have absolutely nothing to do with your marketing, your hiring, or your fulfillment. While all of those things (and more) are important to making a business thrive, there is something else that matters even more.

Your mindset.

Have you adopted the business owner mindset? Are your patterns of thinking evolving every day to be more and more focused on your growth as an owner—rather than an employee?

Let’s take a look and find out.

What Is a Business Owner Mindset?

Your mindset is, to put it simply, the way you think most of the time.

It’s the internal dialog you have with yourself. It’s the way you respond to external events (both good ones and bad ones). And it’s the attitude with which you approach your daily tasks—and life in general.

When you have a business owner mindset, you are directing these patterns of thinking towards the growth of your business. In other words, there are ways that a business owner should think, and ways that they should not.

For example, if your inner voice is regularly telling you that you are going to fail, or that you should pack it up and get a real job, there is definitely room to grow your business owner mindset.

Benefits of Having the Right Business Owner Mindset

Changing your mindset is no easy task. After all, you developed your existing patterns of thinking over your entire lifetime. They were shaped by countless events, people, trials, and joys.

So you won’t adopt the business owner mindset overnight. But there are plenty of advantages to taking the time to develop the right patterns of thinking about your business.

You’ll overcome adversity better. Any business is going to face its fair share of failures and roadblocks. But the business owners with self-defeating mindsets are the ones who will let these challenges hold them back. When you have a truly entrepreneurial mindset, you’ll understand that adversity is simply a chance for your business to grow stronger.

Your team will function more efficiently. Good leaders attract good employees. And likewise, negativity is contagious. As the captain of your ship, your personal mindset will become the mindset that the entire company adopts. Positive patterns of thought will permeate throughout your management team, your employees, and even your customers.

Your business will make more money. If the bottom line is one of your core motivators, then consider this: revenue growth is directly impacted by your mindset. If your ways of thinking are centered around your business, then you will see more opportunities to boost sales, cut out dead weight, and improve your customer experience.

3 Ways to Hack Your Mindset

Are you ready to start developing the mindset of a business owner? Here are three ways to hack your mindset and start rewiring your brain to think for success.

#1 Stop Thinking Like an Employee (Or Even a Manager)

You are the business owner. You aren’t an employee. And you aren’t in middle management.

You’re the top dog. The one who bears the final responsibility, and the one who takes the greatest risks.

One way to help you replace employee patterns of thinking with those of a leader is to create a list of dos and don’ts to read to yourself (out loud) every day. Something like this:

• I DON’T wait for someone to make decisions for me anymore.
• I DO take action, solve problems, and follow up.
• I DON’T work for the weekend anymore.
• I DO work for my financial freedom, whenever it needs to happen.
• I DON’T pass blame or shirk my duties anymore.
• I DO take responsibility for my failure and my success.

#2 Don’t Make Excuses… Ever

So, about responsibility…

Yeah, you’ve got to start taking it. Sometimes, even when it’s not your fault—it is your fault.

Service didn’t get delivered on time because an employee shirked their responsibilities? Well… who hired that employee?

You don’t need to beat yourself up when things go wrong. But what you absolutely must do is NOT make excuses. Ever.

An excuse doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t make the situation any better. It doesn’t make a customer happy. And it doesn’t help you overcome your weakness.

All an excuse really does is let someone avoid facing the truth.

And when we talk about making excuses, it’s not just about dealing with customers and employees. We make excuses for ourselves all the time:  

“I’m not really comfortable with social media, so we won’t take the business in that direction.”

Oh really, you’re going to cut out an entire source of audience engagement and revenue just because you aren’t comfortable? Sounds like an excuse!

So if you are prone to making excuses, it’s time to start cutting phrases like this out of your speech (and even your internal dialog):

• I don’t really need to take care of that now.
• It’s not my fault.
• If I had more time/money/resources/etc.
• We can’t do x until y (a common excuse to procrastinate).
• I’m not very comfortable with x.

#3 Succeed Even When You Fail

One of the most important aspects of the business owner mindset is how you respond to failure. Most average people develop a pattern of thinking that says “Every setback I suffer is a reflection of who I am as a person.”

It’s ingrained in us early on, and it’s a hard mindset to break.

And it’s also an unhealthy one. In life and in business.

Here is a better way to think about failure:  

“The more I push myself beyond my comfort zone, the more I will encounter situations that are difficult for me. The more difficult situations I put myself in, the more I will inevitably encounter setbacks and even failures. And that’s okay.“

Think of it like playing a video game. If you play level one over and over again, you’ll probably get so good that you never make a mistake. The moment you move on to level two, though, you’ll probably start messing up and losing lives. But your skills will also improve as part of those mistakes.

So which type of business owner do you want to be? The type that stays blissfully at level one or the type who struggles through to fight the final boss?