Before You Make Decisions
September 24th, 2020 // 11:14 am @ Scott Manning
One of the most important aspects of being a successful business owner is being able to evaluate opportunities and prioritize your focus both in time and financial investment.
This is why it is vital to have a clear plan and direction around what you want your business to be like not just today but into the future. It’s the only way to determine how to make various decisions and feel confident in them, knowing that they are adding to and not detracting from your long-term objectives.
The same goes for achieving financial independence and freedom. All too often business owners are either negligent or haphazard on their savings and investing. There is no real rhyme or reason to their strategy.
For our Doctors, this is why we always first begin with a blueprint for their practice and the most important initial question we focus on is how they want their practice to fit into their life.
Then and only then do we decide how they want to be working in their practice and what they want to be doing for the money. As the great saying goes the how and the what is not nearly as important as the why.
Going back to last week, as an investor you want your business to be accountable to you in terms of returns however not all returns are created equal because you also have to work for those returns and there is going to be sacrifice required in order to get them.
You want to weigh the sacrifice, the opportunity cost, and the return for what is necessary to achieve your desired results. It is of course about more than just money so the greater clarity you have on this and how it fits into your life, the more joy and fulfillment you will get from it. By the way, that’s important if you are going to withstand the difficulties and overcome the challenges you will face.
For my Doctors in our Wealth Group, the exact same thing applies but we take an even broader look at how money insects with in their lives; in terms of their relationship with money, its relationship with them, and all the streams of wealth they have.
Ask yourself this question: how do you want money to fit into your life to be used as facilitator to realize your ambitions and also as resource towards future investing?
Of course, saying it out loud sounds like common sense but when you are an entrepreneur every single decision you make with money has such powerful implications because it is now one less dollar you’ve got to do whatever other alternatives you could have done with it.
This is why having a clearly laid out plan and organized approach to how you invest is so critical. How else do you make sure you have correctly prioritized what you do with your money and the returns you should expect?
Bringing us full circle, as a business owner, one of your top responsibilities is to be able to weigh these priorities (both inside and outside of your business), with your time, money, effort, actions, resources, people, and everything else you have to do deal with for every decision you have to make.
The more finite you are on your big picture objectives, the less likely you are to get distracted or swayed from your core purpose. You will be steady handed in how you manage your business operations and investing. The very same thing goes for your life… how you manage living and investing outside of your business.
Remember, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, especially as a business owner. What precedes those actions are of course – decisions!
How you contemplate and ultimately make your decisions is the most vital part of entrepreneurship. There is nothing more powerful than a ‘decision’ because it sets everything else into motion. Get it wrong and no execution will make up for it.
Next week, we’ll talk about how you evaluate, organize, and prioritize your decisions. We will discuss these related to your business future and your financial moves.
In the meantime, assess how you feel about the direction of your business – your actual business and your money business – and what decisions are looming that require more clarity before answering. We’ll pick up here next week.
Category : Blog
