“God” is a politically incorrect term these days, of course, but that hasn’t been the main thing stopping me from mentioning it in my blog posts. I have no problem offending people; I have several references I can provide that will back my story. Rather, I’ve been somewhat concerned about conveying inaccurate messages about my personal brand. I’ve held back from mentioning God in the context of my business for fear of coming across as someone pushing a religious agenda, or, God forbid, a cult follower.

I have decided that for me to not mention God in my business is equally inauthentic, and conveys an equally inaccurate impression about my personal branding. I won’t go into detail here, but I just want to mention and acknowledge that the spiritual realm has been integral and instrumental in the development of the Introverted Entrepreneur brand, and in my writing.

I should also mention that I have a highly unconventional view of the word “God” and what it means. This is partly because I was an atheist until 2007, right before I became an entrepreneur. The two are not coincidental. Before seeking out God, I didn’t have the guts to go into business for myself. I needed to see proof that it was going to work.

That’s really about it for now.

There’s no hiding it, thanks to time-stamps that don’t lie. I haven’t updated this blog in several weeks. While I find it irritating when I see bloggers who start out their blog posts with something along the lines of “sorry I haven’t posted in awhile,” I have to acknowledge this breakdown. This is the first time since I started the blog in 2007 that such a long time period has elapsed between blog posts. I’ve had an influx of paying clients over the last several months (a great problem to have), and this has led to somewhat of a time-management crisis. Yep, growing pains.

I thought I would use this blog post to share some insights that I’ve gotten from this period of my entrepreneurial development. Here’s the low-down.

1. Being too busy to do important things is a client-repellent.

2. Getting in the zone is the way to be effective in business.

3. Managing a million tiny things is a great way to get out of the zone.

4. No one respects a person who answers e-mail immediately.

That’s about all I have time to write for the moment, which is another key point that I’ll use to close this posting. In my old mindset, I would not have written this posting, because I didn’t have more than 5 minutes to spend on it. Successful entrepreneurs do what they can in the time that they have. I used to use “I don’t have time” as an excuse for everything. I’m using this blog post to mark the end of that era.

As most of us have figured out, it takes multiple streams of income to thrive in the new economy. From my perspective as an introverted entrepreneur, this is a good thing and a bad thing. My greatest strength (and my greatest weakness at the same time) is the fact that I’m great at thinking up lots of new ideas. I’m great at multitasking and doing a lot of different things, making pretty good headway at all of them. However, I’m also great at starting 35 things and only finishing 11 of them.

You can probably see that this can be a good thing and a bad thing when it comes to building multiple streams of income. Managing multiple income-generating games at the same time requires a level of discipline and focus that I wasn’t born with. I’ve come back to the same conclusion that I usually come to, at this point: I’m not going to pull this off alone. It’s going to take a team effort.

There are potentially a lot of balls to juggle – and there’s also a strong potential that a lot of them will get dropped. So, I’ve decided that I need to keep track of it all. In my usual introverted fashion, I put together a super-complicated spreadsheet consisting of more potential types of action than I would ever actually take. I thought I would track every possible type of action on a day-to-day basis, and I created a system so ungodly awful that managing it would become a full-time job.

I’ve decided to dumb it down as far as humanly possible. I’m going to be tracking four things:

1. Sales conversations (at any stage of the selling process)

2. Number of sales made.

3. Number of dollars earned.

4. Total dollar amount of checks taken to the bank.

5. Bank account balance.

Then, there’s a next step. I’m inviting some friends to play along with me on this. I’ve made it so generic that it can apply to any business of any kind. My goal is simple – we’re all going to watch each other’s stats on a week to week basis. I think that should provide some motivation.

Are you willing to shift gears in your business? What about in your writing? It’s a fine line to walk. Every now and then, it’s necessary to re-evaluate your strategy. However, it can be tricky. At some point, you have to ask yourself if you’re throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Confession: this blog post was prompted by a recent decision to shift gears on my part. I decided that I’ve lost the original focus of this blog. Okay; maybe I didn’t lose the focus entirely, but I certainly compromised it when I decided to constrain the scope to writing. When I started writing this blog in late 2007, my intent was simple. I basically just needed to rant and vent about my frustrations with the extravert-dominated sales world and its continual resistance to change. There came  a point, though, when I realized that I needed to grow past this.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to return to the core fundamental purpose of this blog. Instead of getting up on my soapbox about how to become better at writing (I’ll continue to do that at EzineArticles), I’m going to be sharing about my experiences as an Introverted Entrepreneur. I hope this doesn’t bother you.

If you have big plans for where you want your business to go eventually, but you have no clear strategy for getting there, consider that all you need to do is start writing.

This is especially helpful if you’re having a hard time thinking of things to write about.

For example, you might be the owner of an ordinary pizza shop that pays the bills, but has you working 75 hours a week. You’ve got it all mapped out – you want create a new concept of pizza shop.You can picture the distinctive items on the menu, what the place will look like, and what the customers will say about the place. You know that if you had the cash to get this off the ground, it would work, and it could even become a chain of pizza restaurants.

Start writing about the final completion of the idea. Write about what form it will take and what it will look like. Also, begin to speculate about how you might get from here to there, and write about that. You’ll surprise yourself with the ideas you come up with. Also, when you write it out, you’ll find yourself developing a new degree of clarity about the idea itself, and you’ll find yourself talking about it more often. You’ll find other people getting more interested, and you’ll find people wanting to help you.

When you start writing your ideas into existence, great things happen.