Is your business giving you want you want? Or are you thinking that it is time you broke up? Find out how to know if your business is the right business for you by reading our article.
Are You Having An Affair On Your Business?
This is something we see happen to a lot of entrepreneurs. They start their business and are so passionate about it, because that’s what we’ve always been told. You’ve heard the popular culture: ‘Lean in!’ ‘Find your passion!’. So these entrepreneurs start a business they’re so passionate about, and they’re in that honeymoon phase where everything is wonderful. Then, two and a half or three years down the track, that passion starts to lose its shine. So entrepreneurs, having internalized that ‘find your passion’ advice… they tend to fall in love with something else. They have another bright, shiny object they drift towards. Why do they do this? Because typically, the thing that they’re doing, this beast that they’ve built… it just isn’t giving them what they actually want. There’s something that’s missing.
So what we want to do, is give you a checklist of three things you want to be really clear on to make sure that your business is giving you what you want: to make sure the dog is wagging the tail rather than the tail wagging the dog.
The simple formula for this consists of three things.
The first thing is money. Make sure you’re really clear on how much money this business needs to make for you. Particularly what you want to look at what should break even. For you personally, what’s the breakeven for the business and what’s your ideal lifestyle and how much is that going to cost. You want to create a timeline around this. We’d normally suggest having a three, a two and a one year timeline; in that order, so you can reverse engineer it and work backwards from your bigger goals.
The second criteria is time. We’ve heard the age-old advice that you should be working in the business. This can be true! We’ve got clients that are highly skilled and highly knowledgeable in their area, and they want to put those skills to use in a more direct tangible way than simply overseeing and leadership. The example we always hear is ‘Steve Jobs still worked in his business’. But what’s important to know is that Steve Jobs chose the areas where he got to be the heart surgeon. That’s what you need to figure out. What’s the heart surgeon work you want to be putting in?
This is where time breaks down into two sections: you’ve got strategic time and renewal time. Renewal time is time-out: your downtime, in which you as a business owner get to recover. We are strong believers in the notion that you can’t fill from an empty cup, and this has been backed up by the data we’ve seen over the years. Our clients are tested and measured every month, we get a profit and loss and balance sheet so we can help them figure out what works, and we can genuinely say that the clients who took the most amount of holidays over the years, are the ones that scale their businesses the most. This is because they’ve figured out that balance between strategic time and renewal time, and that’s what we want to help you achieve!
The third and last criteria is impact. Here we mean both the impact on the community at large and the impact to you. Your product and service deliver amazing outcomes to people out there. You’re helping people, vendors, your team! What do you want that legacy to be? What message do you want to outlast you? As for yourself, what is it that you want to learn? Especially to a place of mastery.
That’s it. Time, money and impact. Those are the three criteria. Thinking about these three categories will help you figure out what exactly it is that you’re optimizing your business for. From there, we can help you build a model that goes around that. We’d love to help you out with this! And to sweeten the deal even further, we’re even going to give you a free copy of our founder Dave Dugan’s book. Get your free copy of ‘Bullet Proof Business’ by David Dugan – and learn smart strategies to protect, maximise and accelerate your business. It’s the ultimate guide for any serious business owner.
Click here– to download your copy today.
