Do You Own a Business or a Job?

Why did you get into business?

·      Was it because you love doing the craft?

·      Was it to make a lot of money? 

·      Was it to escape having to work for someone else?

·      Was it to have a lot of free time – while others did the work?

There are a lot of good reasons to go into a business, and these are certainly good ones – just different. 

The next important question is – what do you want from this experience?

If you just want to perform a craft – a valid question is to ask if it would be better to work for someone else – who is responsible for all the marketing, sales, and doing collections.  Because those activities are just as important as doing the technical work well.  People can’t buy from you if they don’t know about you.  Someone needs to do the marketing and sales. 

On the other hand – if owning a business is most important – it is hard to remain in operation if you aren’t consistently getting enough paying customers, generating profitable Sales, and getting paid on time.  And that decreases the amount of time you have available for doing the craft well – and having free time too.

That said, if you turn the question around and decide that serving a large number of customers supremely well in a particular craft is most important – then the problem can be approached from a different paradigm.  Now the owner can decide that getting the work done is more important than being the person doing it.  Now the challenge switches to how to hire and train people to get the work done your way – rather than doing it yourself.  Now the possibilities can become more interesting. 

Now you can focus on questions like;

·      How do I get people bringing in higher volumes of Leads?  …More cost effectively?,

·      How do I get people Selling more work?,

·      How do I get greater volumes of work done more cost efficiently – while increasing customer satisfaction and brand reputation?,

·      Etc.

This gets us to a more interesting aspect of the question about Ownership.

The word “Owner” implies an asset - that has value – like a house.  The value of a house is decided by the market – but the market uses a variety of parameters to establish value; factors like location, square footage, quality of construction, age, etc. 

A business is similar.  The exact process of calculating value is more complicated, but factors like volume of cash flow, profitability, growth rate, future profit opportunity, and the ability of the business to operate and grow without the daily participation of the owner are big parts of that calculation.  So that would imply those factors become the most important aspects of the owner’s job description - to find ways to increase the value of the business.  So that when he decides to retire – he can do so with a sale that provides an attractive retirement lump sum – above what he might have saved externally. 

A couple final questions:

·      What are the mindset differences between an owner who built a $1Million business and an owner who built a $1Billion business?

·      Which do you want to be?

Want to know your key focus area to help grow your business? Try our 3 min Assessment Quiz at https://stevechiama.nextlevelassessment.com/?source=LI_Event - 6Steps