As business owners, I think we can agree that getting and keeping customers is the lifeblood of every single business – including yours.

As obvious as it is though, not enough business owners are dedicating enough time to tasks that help achieve these two fundamental elements of business.

Most business owners come into work and the first thing they do is check their emails, talk to staff and deal with enquiries and any issues/complaints. The problem with this is that once you start reading emails and responding to enquiries and talking to staff, your day will get away from you and you’ve got no time left to work on the “stuff” that will help you get and keep more customers.

So the behaviour needs to change.

And the easiest thing you can do (and you can start it tomorrow!) is to dedicate a slot of time to work on things that will get and keep customers.

For most people, their best work happens in the first half of the day. Their brain is sharper, the output prolific. It’s when they’re at their best. (For some it may be in the afternoon or evening but it’s a specific slot during the day.)

So if you normally start your day to day tasks at 9:00am then come in at 7:30 a.m. and spend the next 90 minutes doing the things that would help you to get and keep more customers. Craft offers, writing sales or engagement/follow up emails, develop the new products – all the things that would make your business more successful.

And the businesses we know that have achieved proper success and significant profits are the ones that have kept on doing this, first thing, every morning, every working day. Seriously.

Whether it’s from working from a back bedroom in your house or if you have an office, get in before your main day starts (say 7:30a.m if you start at 9:00), shut the office door. Turn off the mobile phone, take the office phone off the hook, and don’t check your email. Don’t even have a sneaky peek at what’s come into the inbox overnight because nothing should deflect you, during those critical first 90 minutes of the day, from doing the single most important thing for the success of your business – the 90 minutes on the getting and keeping of customers.

It means that you emerge, blinking into the light, at around 9:00 a.m. and can take on whatever the rest of the day throws at you – because you’ve done the most important thing.

Why 90 minutes? Because most human brains can stay ‘in the zone’ for that long.

Don’t get distracted, stay focused and you’ll get a heck of a lot of stuff done.

Once you get much beyond an hour and a half, most find it very hard to maintain optimum concentration.

But think about it; 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week, that’s 30 hours a month of uninterrupted focused time to make the things happen that move your business to where you want it to be. I promise you, the impact can be revelationary – once you take responsibility and develop the habit.

In short, if it’s “work”, it won’t make you rich. Which is why you have to get off that treadmill, find those 90 minute chunks and focus “on” your business rather than “in” it.