Entrepreneurship from the road is no easy feat. You may be spending your life chasing Wi-Fi. Others commit to lower-traffic travel days that often happen mid-week during “normal” business hours. Life as a nomad makes it hard to attend meetings, and shifting time zones every few days adds stress.
However, this lifestyle also adds many more layers of adventure and fun. It enables to enjoy LIFE! So, we really can’t complain, can we?
Steps to Succeed in Entrepreneurship from the Road
Yes, entrepreneurship from the road is a little bit different, and that’s why we like it. Still, to be successful requires a little extra strategic planning and time management to avoid uncertainty and unrest. With three simple shifts, you can increase the time spent around the campfire and decrease the time spent putting out fires in your business.
1. Take Note of Where You Spend Your Time
Ever get to the end of the day and think, “What did I actually accomplish today?” It can feel so deflating to finish a day with that mindset. I know because I’ve been there, and to keep me from falling into time-sucking black holes, I’ve adopted a practice of noticing how each hour is spent.
Taking note of your time throughout the day won’t just help you know what you’ve accomplished. It’ll also help you identify black holes that have sucked away your attention from tasks that are necessary for growth.
For example, have you noticed you spend too long playing that mindless game on your phone between tasks? Continue to play it, but limit the black hole of time by only giving yourself five minutes for the brain break.
Have you noticed that a particular project takes too long but is too simple of a job to take that long? For me, it’s posting on social media. I get caught up in doom-scrolling and forget to pay attention to what I need to do. To minimize that black hole, I have shifted where I show up on social media, using planning tools rather than allowing myself to get too mired down by the feed. For engaging on other people’s feeds, I set a timer to minimize how much time I’ll comment and like other people’s content and build relationships.
Simple Shift: Start a productivity journal. At the end of each day, reflect on where you spent your time, what you accomplished, and what you want to do the next day. In taking a couple of extra minutes to jot these notes down, you’ll identify the black holes where you’ve lost momentum and understand where you can build sustained momentum tomorrow.
2. Use Data to Determine Whether Your Time Spent is Worth the Rewards
I recently chatted with a friend about growing her business online. She was getting ready to launch a new product, and I suggested having a strong email plan to make that happen. While she didn’t disagree, she also decided to lean more heavily into social media to spur sales. To each their own.
About three days into the launch, I received a message from her saying, “You were right!” While she got engagement on social media, every single sale came from the direct connection she made in the inbox.
I don’t share this story to persuade you to use email more often in your business but rather to emphasize that data trumps gut feelings. Email versus social media is one of those times.
There’s a thrill to posting on social media, so it makes sense that our gut reaction is to post more often to get more sales. Posting equals sales. We feel like we’re reaching the masses because our posts are public. We see the likes and think we’re making a difference. We see the comments, and we know we’re sparking engagement.
But here’s the reality — the user intent on social media vastly differs from the user intent of the inbox. On social media, people expect to be entertained. In email, people expect to consume information.
Simple Shift: To increase your chances of success, let data point you to where the success comes from. Then, follow the breadcrumbs. My friend’s sales came from the inbox, but email subscribers came from social media. She needed an approach that encompassed both, AND she needed a different message on each platform. By using data to clarify those goals, she was able to use social media to build her list and then use her list to build her profits.
3. Pause and Review Before Sprinting Ahead
It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind. We want to consistently keep hustling, going, and rolling down the proverbial business road. The challenge here is that in keeping a laser focus ahead, you miss important lessons learned along the way.
Enter: The After-Action Framework
This framework is designed to look retrospectively at a specific period. This period could be a launch period, like my friend’s above. It could be a monthly period, like I teach in my workshop, Map Your Year. Or, it could even be after a missed client opportunity where you didn’t get the gig you wanted.
The concept is simple. After a given period in your business, ask yourself a few critical questions:
- What did I want to have happen?
- What happened?
- What can I do to change the outcome next time?
This approach to entrepreneurship from the road works well because it takes the data and applies action steps. As I often tell my kids, all you can control is your attitude and effort. By tapping into an after-action framework in your business, you get both. Your attitude changes from feeling defeated or joyous to feeling empowered to find or repeat success in the future. As a result, you’ll have clear action steps to know where to put your efforts going forward.
Simple Shift: Adopt an after-action framework for your business. Conduct it on travel days when you can pause and think without being “on” or checking off a to-do list item for your business.
How Do You Find Balance and Success On the Road?
Your turn! Do you have a special time hack or productivity tip about entrepreneurship from the road to share with us? We’d love to hear from you! Let’s keep the conversation going in the RVE Community group on Facebook. Together, we’ll link arms as RV entrepreneurs to build success in unconventional ways.
Find all articles and podcast episodes from Kimberly Crossland.
