Business not growing fast enough for you?  Not getting the results you want?  Read on for some of the typical bad habits of small business owners to see if you might want to change your ways.

1. Focus on getting it right the first time. Often times we try so hard to get things exactly right that we scrap way too many good efforts and ideas.  Perfectionism is one of the biggest buzz kills to your business (or to anything, for that matter).  Stop worrying about doing things right and start worrying about doing something, learning from the process and trying again ASAP.
2. Make sure you know what you’re doing before jumping in.  If you wait until you feel completely certain, you might be waiting a very long time.  Don’t know how?  Think you need more experience, training, or education first?  There’s a shortcut that will get you around all of this:  learn by doing.
3. Watch what everyone else is doing, and copy them. Yes, you can learn a lot from other successful people.  But if you want to ramp up your success, you’ll go farther by standing out from the crowd, not with them.  For more on this, read Seth Godin’s book The Purple Cow.
4. Wait until the time feels right. Guess what?  It won’t. See item #2 above. Did you ever see the movie Sideways?  One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when the main guy has this amazing bottle of wine and tells his girlfriend that he’s just waiting for the right special event to show up so that he can open the bottle of wine.  Her response? When you open the bottle of wine, that IS the special event. In other words, having the right timing has much less to do with waiting for the moment than it does creating the moment. You can make it the right time by setting your own agenda and following your own timeline.
5. Go it alone.  Hooray for you—you’re Do-it-all-woman!  Congratulations—now you’re completely swamped with too much on your plate.  So: learn to ask for help.  Hire out the pieces you can.  Delegate. Get a mentor. Enlist the support of others.  Doing it all is overrated, not to mention a drag on your business.

Soooo…do YOU have any bad business habits that need breaking? How have you dealt with any bad business habits that you have?