~~Recognize your strengths and work from them:. Acknowledge your weaknesses and failures (life's way of providing feedback) and grow from them. Read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber... it's a "must have" business book.

~~Create a strong business foundation: a business plan, marketing plan, and operations manual. Follow them. Create forms and processes to keep you on track, etc. Choose to be organized and consistent. Your clients and employees will appreciate it!

~~Develop your boundaries and standards. They affect your business too! There are some wonderful Top Ten Lists on both topics at www.topten.org.

~~When business is no longer fun, it is time to reassess what you are doing. Even better - step back and assess your "fun" quotient every six months. Hey! Maybe its time to take your vacation!!

~~If you do not have enough time in your life, work with your coach to pinpoint tasks that you may be able to delegate or eliminate. You may want to look into hiring a Virtual Assistant www.coachmaria.com/coaching.html#Virtual.

~~Listen to others and consider outside advice. Incorporate what you like into your plan. However, do not feel pressured to adopt another's practices as your own. Ultimately, you are best equipped to implement how and why you run your business.

I remember a time when I had a problem with an employee that was draining me financially. He wasn't stealing from me, at least not in literal sense. But he was costing me plenty and not producing. By time I got it resolved I had gone from doing pretty well to $50,000 in debt. My business credit line was maxed out. I remember thinking that I couldn't imagine getting out of this hole and "doing well" again. It was very discouraging but I kept at it and, sure enough, was out of debt sooner than I expected.

Think about that example. I said "...I had gone from doing pretty well to $50,000 in debt." When I was "doing pretty well", I couldn't have imagined that I would ever be in pickle I found myself in; namely $50,000 in debt. There are those cycles again! Is it possible that when things were going great that I got a little complacent, a little lazy? Very possible! Did that complacency or laziness contribute to decline? Probably.

The lesson is this: understand that your business, like many things in life, will run in cycles. It's easy to get complacent when things are great, and it's easy to get discouraged when they are not. So don't. If you keep at it all time you can exploit good times and minimize bad. Imagine that