Every morning I spend about 45 minutes on the following small business activities: working ON the business and monitoring.
It has helped me and our business greatly to make consistent progress. No quick fixes or magic bullet. Rather continuous development or kaizen.
My Morning “Working ON the Business Activities”
about 30 minutes before “chaos takes over”: I Pick ONE of the following activities and alternate during the week
- Business Development: Stuff we are working on that grows the business. What new products or solutions with big potential are in the works? What strategic partnerships are we working on that can really bring a part of our business forward?
- Offer Development: This is about using existing resources in a new way. Can I create a sale, a launch event, a new offer or bring best practices from one person/market to another to generate attention of our customers and income?
- Fixing long-standing problems (big and small): This is about problems/friction we have started to work around instead of solving directly. Instead of ignoring or accepting these things, I use these 30 minutes to deal with the root of the problem. “fixing a 100 small problems” (and maybe a few big ones) needs “free brain time”. Kaizen.
- Margin review: Where do we need to review pricing and margins upwards. Were can we up-sell, cross-sell or find new income generating offers.
- Partner communication: This is not answering emails and messages, but about initiating communication with partners by giving updates or asking questions (social, email, messages, partnerzone updates, newsletters,…).
My Morning Dashboard Monitoring activities:
max 10 minutes to get a grasp of the “cruise speed” of the business – this is looking back of course. Activity is what drives success.
- PartnerZone (=our digital workplace with partners) visitors – more than 40/day is a “good day”
- PartnerZone projects (including drafts) – more than 10 projects and a total value of over 100K is a “good day”. Sometimes I also have a quick “deep dive” into projects per salesperson to see the dynamic of different “markets” (we have 6 right now but growing).
- PartnerZone “Accepted”+”In Process” projects = our confirmed pipeline – more than 1 month sales is “good”
- Xero – YTD Sales compared with last 2 years to get perspective and compensate for daily rush of good&bad news.
And then it is 9.00 AM 
Every single day I have invested these early morning 45 minutes for more than 10 years now. I believe it has helped to build Genesis Home Technology Architects into what it is today.
Maybe some of these elements of my morning business routine can help you too.
Atomic habits with an exponential impact 👊🏼.