Perseverance and Consistency = Success

What is the key to success? Whether it’s growing your IT business, becoming a good saleperson or implementing a new system or tool, the ability to stick at it – consistency – and to not give up when things don’t go right first time – perseverance – are key.

Overnight Success is a myth

When you start a business, but fail to stick around very long – you don’t give yourself enough time to learn your trade or, importantly, to build a solid reputation. This is important. Many of the “overnight successes” we observe in business are often the result of years worth of perseverance and consistency. Years worth of having a plan and sticking to it. Not giving up when things don’t go right the first time.

Consistency in the IT industry

In the industry that I work in, the IT Managed Service business, I sadly often see lack of consistency and lack of perseverance hurting people and businesses in three areas.

• Finding new clients. Marketing is a system, not an event. (Tweet this) Do a little each day, consistently. The results will come. Don’t wait until your pipeline is empty before you start to look for leads.
• Implementing a new system. Moving your IT business from a simple Helpdesk application to a Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool, underpinned by solid business processes, is tough. It’s frustrating. It’s time consuming. But giving up on implementing such a system it because it’s more comfortable to stick where you are means you are, at best, postponing what needs to be done to ensure your future success, or at worst, aborting those future plans altogether.
• Becoming a leader. If you’re a Technician who needs to put down his tools and become the boss, it feels like you are starting your career from scratch. It takes focus on doing the things that leaders do – day in, day out. Or you could pretend you’re indispensable for that server build again and put off becoming a leader until tomorrow. Or the day after. Or the year after that.

Get good at things by doing them consistently

In all these cases, Don’t put things off until you think you’re really good at them. Don’t worry about technique for now. If you’re no good at something, do it anyway. Every day. Keep doing it and you’ll get good at it.

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