When we start our own businesses, we work sooooooo hard.

Super-early starts, late night finishes, seven days a week in the office.

You know the drill. We’ve all been there.

But, in a lot of cases, if we had stopped and looked at what we were actually doing in those early days, we would have said to ourselves “I’m wasting my time.”

So why do we keep working so hard for so long?

Because, when we start, someone slips a tape into our head that says,

“As long as you’re working hard, you’re not a bad guy.”

The last thing we want to be is a bad guy.

So, we keep busting our gut on the hard work we shouldn’t be doing.

Convincing ourselves that only we could do X, Y or Z. Resisting hiring help or delegating.

But, hey, at least we were working hard, right? At least we weren’t a lazy bad guy…

Well, I hate to burst your bubble but here are some hard truths for you:

• There is no honour in hard work if that hard work is stupid.
• Working hard on the wrong things DOES make you a bad guy.

Virtually all of us have been a bad guy in our early days as an entrepreneur.

We don’t break any laws, but because we equate ALL hard work with goodness, we needlessly hurt ourselves and those who count on us most.

That’s not what good guys do.

Are you doing it right now, this week?

Are you spending parts of your working day doing ten pound an hour jobs that could easily be delegated or outsourced?

Things like your bookkeeping, answering the phone, hands-on installations or customer work that you ‘can do better than anyone else so I might as well…’

NEWSFLASH: If you’re doing any of that it makes you a ‘bad guy’.

Because there is no ‘goodness’ in hard work.

In fact, I’d venture to say that most hard work by business owners often does more evil than good…by robbing us of time to do the game-changing work we’re truly capable of.

In many ways this is what thebestof Eastbourne is all about: 

Freeing you to do the GOOD work you were put on this earth to do.

Freeing you to achieve your potential.

But it can’t happen if you’re a bad guy - Wasting time, doing things that should NOT be on your agenda!

So have a think – what things are you doing that are holding you back from being a “good guy” and holding you back from moving your business forward?

And if you need help getting clarity and identifying the things you should be focussing on, just drop us a line.