I know, nobody likes the 9 to 5. In fact, if you’re in an online business chances are there are a lot of elements of a corporate job that you just cannot stand. Punching in and out, having a limited time for lunch, not being able to go on vacation when you want to, sucking it up when somebody tells you something that you don’t want to hear.

All of these are reasons to want to work online and to build a stable and lasting online business. But the fact is, the corporate structure has survived and become dominant for so long because it works.

There are a lot of things that a corporate environment gets from its employees that an entrepreneur hesitates or refuses to give to themselves. Come with me for a few minutes and let’s analyze some of those reasons and let’s think about ways to bring the best of corporate America to your own business.

At the end of the quarter, chances are that a standard job will bring you into an office and ask you whether or not you achieved your goals for the quarter. It will ask you if you didn’t achieve goals, why didn’t you? Whether they were sales goals or productions goals, whatever it was, they want to know whether you made the cut. It’s very rare that entrepreneur will hold themselves to the same standard.

So I want to encourage you at the beginning of the month to set a goal and at the end of the month, ask yourself whether you actually achieve that goal. Make it a real measurable number of a goal, something financial. You might think that you are not ready to reach the goals that you have set but usually those are excuses, and I know there are plenty of those. Maybe you don’t want to reach those goals because the economy is bad. Maybe you can’t reach those goals because you haven’t made that amount in a month before.

There are plenty of excuses but you’ve got to be willing to, first of all, set goals; 2, hold yourself accountable; and 3, remove self-imposed road blocks and limitations. I know how tough that can be. I’ve struggled with it in the past. As human beings, it can be hard to conceive of a situation until we’ve seen it, felt it, and experience it.

But you know what, the human mind is also very adaptable; and the more that you envelope yourself and people places situations, the more your mind will adjust and give yourself the driving power to achieve.

You know what, in the real world, you don’t always get to do the things that you want to do at the times you want to do them. That kind of freedom can be very damaging to the self-esteem and pride of somebody who really wants to work as an entrepreneur but it provides discipline.

Imagine, how much better you’d be at managing your time if you decided the requests that you wanted to accommodate and which ones you needed to shelf to the side. A lot of people refuse to do this because they are worried that they will feel guilty but let me tell you, there’s not guilt that feels as bad as failure.

On your job you’ll usually find that some boss has shopped a piece of work that they don’t really want to do onto your desk. But it’s rare that we’ll take the initiative and do this for ourselves. Whenever there is a task that you don’t want to, can’t, or aren’t really skilled at doing, it is important that you give up your minute control and let someone else do it. Chances are that you won’t always get perfect results or the results won’t be exactly the way you would have done them. But as a solopreneur, you’ve got so many tasks to do that you can’t insist on doing everything yourself all of the time.

Here’s another thing that goes on in the corporate world that you might not like, ‘Waiting forever to get a promotion.’

When you’ve got a job, you’ve got to work at that job for a very long time before someone even gives you an eyeball about moving up. When working on the business world by ourselves, we can’t assign ourselves any job that we want without really learning the fundamental skills that are required, that are prerequisite for us to advance to the next level.

Don’t be afraid to slow your progress to really learn each individual skill of what you’ll need to get to the next level before taking that next step. If you try to advance too quickly, you’re liable to fall flat on your face or ruin it by being too eager to jump into deep waters.

Let’s face it, nobody likes to wait, nobody likes to be held accountable, nobody likes to do gigs that they don’t want to do. But all these things have one thing in common, structure and discipline; and when you start giving that to your business, you start giving yourself the baseline that you need for a larger success down the line.