Have you ever thought to yourself that your business is not progressing the way you had hoped, that you are trying everything you can possibly think of and yet you still find yourself disappointed with the speed of the outcome.

Have you considered that there may be things that you’re doing or not doing, unintentionally or subconsciously, that could in fact be slowing you down, when it comes to your entrepreneurial vision.

Here are five potential reasons why you may not be doing as well as you’d hoped, and how you can speed up your progress as an entrepreneur and go further, faster!

1. You’re Not Outsourcing

Are you trying to do everything yourself simply because you can? It’s great that you can do everything, but that doesn’t mean to say that you should be doing everything. There are only so many hours in a day that you are available to work on your ideas, your projects and your business.

We would all like more time, and we can all get it, by investing in other people’s time to get our jobs done. The quicker you can finish what you started, the quicker you can start generating an income from it.

So start delegating to virtual staff and more.

2. You’re Not Giving Yourself A Break

Serial entrepreneurs, especially those of us building a business around our expertise, are renowned for working ‘every waking hour,’ and while to many of us who love what we do, we don’t mind putting all these hours in to nurture our ideas, it’s a simple fact that eventually, if you don’t take a break – you will burn out, and if you do burn out, things could grind to a halt.

Look after yourself, so that you can look after your business and keep the ball consistently rolling. Underneath the surface we are all built the same, (unless you are one of Stan Lee’s “super-humans” of course) and we all need to give our minds and our bodies time to recharge so our own performance doesn’t suffer and slow us down. 

For example myself and my wife take 10-days off at the end of Q1 and the beginning of Q4 each and every year.

In addition, each August we take the entire month for a full-blown sabbatical.

It helps to re-energize us, and personally, from a mental bandwidth perspective, I need it at that point in the year!

3. You Are Working Harder Rather Than Smarter

Many entrepreneurs, when they are going through the learning curve, tend to take the scenic route – we all need to learn from trial and error, and that’s often what makes us such experts at what we do, however we also need to find a way to limit the potential impact from the duration of this learning curve.

Many years ago I had a revelation after reading The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss – “eliminate” and “automate”, what a simple yet outstanding concept, but once you have done this and outsourced whatever you can, you then need to “prioritise”, for example, if you’re a start-up, you may want to begin investing your time and energy only into things that will bring in a profit as quickly as possible.

Whatever your primary goal is, prioritise the things that are going to get you there, the fastest. That’s focus on your entrepreneurial vision.

Your “to do” list will seem far less overwhelming this way.

4. You Have The “Protection” Mindset

Collaboration is not just for teams, or for people working together. If you are in the mindset that you have created something wonderful and unique, yet you are desperately trying to protect your idea from the competition, and you are trying to build an empire all on your own, you could be “trying” forever.

You need to network and collaborate, and in many cases working directly with your competition is the best way to accelerate your growth, as they already have the audience you need and there could be a way that you can work together for mutually beneficial gains. Switching to the “abundance” mindset, will likely accelerate your growth.

5. You’re Not Taking Big Enough Risks

It’s virtually impossible to get where you want to be as an entrepreneur, as well as constantly developing and growing your entrepreneurial vision, with any kind of speed, without taking a few risks and stepping outside of your comfort zone.

If you’re always going to do the same thing, then you will most likely always get the same results.

What’s got you to ‘here’, won’t get you to where you want to go.

Look at your business honestly and objectively, study your return on investment, and if something just isn’t working for you, no matter how many experts say it should, “scrap it” and do something new and infinitely more exciting that what you were doing.

Raise your game, change your strategy, and you will eventually succeed!