The Evolution Of A Business Owner
September 17th, 2020 // 10:39 am @ Scott Manning
As I brought back to life the biggest reason why most ‘small’ business owners never break free into the real possibilities and potentials of both lifestyle and financial success is because they stay trapped in their business with nothing more than a high paid job.
This is beyond the majority. The percentage is very small for business owners and professional practice owners – my doctors – who arrive at financial independence before they run out of time in their careers. This is often because they don’t see their business, firm, agency, practice, or however they describe their entity, as an investment of their time, knowledge, and money. Instead, they see it only as a way of making a living and earning an income (which they manage by excess cash flow or even worse they manage by a comfortable pre-set salary).
The alternative to this is focusing on the profitability of your business and knowing what, as an investment, you would expect on the return from this business assets.
It is a bigger shift in mindset than it is in actual behavior or accounting even. It is about seeing yourself as more than just a doer of whatever you do to make the money and more than just the boss who sets the schedule.
It’s about seeing yourself as both an asset – that you invest into yourself and you invest yourself into your business – as well as an actual investor of the profits that come out of your business to then go to work for you.
The simple question is what do you have to show for all the work, all the time, all the energy, and all the effort invested?
This goes back a couple weeks to my cold hard facts and tough loving truth that it’s not about just ‘cutting expenses’ or ‘saving money;’ it is about creating a greater and more valuable opportunity for yourself and those around you by building a better more fertile and profitable business.
My doctors that get this right take it as seriously as anything else in their businesses to get to their profit number as quickly as possible during a given month in order to reach that point that they are actually and truly ‘working for themselves.’
You see, that’s the big fallacy of business ownership – until you have this dialed in – you aren’t working for yourself even if you considered self-employed inside of your own business entity. You are working for everyone and everything else until you’ve reach this level and you have surpassed this most critical threshold in your business.
Now, there should be a quality-based lifestyle as well from owning the business – but anyone can have that just by wanting less and working less. The key to business ownership is to embrace wanting more and being in harmony with whatever is required to make it happen.
You get to define business ownership for yourself and how you determine success, but I’d sure challenge you to have goals bigger than just paying the bills and making it through the end of the next calendar month or hanging in there until you next planned vacation.
There are a lot easier ways with less stress and responsibilities to do all of that. The rewards that come with the responsibility of business ownership are that you get to define and determine the rules of engagement and the spoils that you claim as a result of winning.
When I see business owners stuck it’s because they have boxed themselves in to a way of thinking or doing that has limited them. They’ve started to fall victim to the employee mentality and feel there will always be a tomorrow, another week, month, year to get to that next level or perhaps they may have lost all motivation for any next levels at all.
But why, what’s the point? Why take the risk and carry the burden if you aren’t going to go all in and design a business that serves both sides of your interests?
Here’s something to ponder this week…
If you were an outside investor in your own business… how well would you be stacking up to your expectations?
What decisions would you as investor be forcing you as boss to make?
Where are you falling short on returns that an investor would expect?
What are you not doing or have been delaying that you would have promised an investor?
It’s great to be a business owner, it’s why I chose this path that I’m on very deliberately because I wanted to help business owners break free from the same thinking that held me back earlier on, that you can’t have it all… own the business, make the rules, set the schedule, have an income, have a great lifestyle, and also build something that was profitable that turned you into an investor who ultimately gets the greatest leverage.
You can, in fact, have all of this as long as you understand and are clear on how money moves by holding yourself to a higher standard. You can’t fall into the trap of just spinning your wheels as the doer of your thing, content with just being your own boss, and happy to call yourself self-employed.
The key to being a business owner is to be paid for what you do and to earn a return as the original investor in your enterprise. There are a lot of responsibilities in wearing both hats, but you surely aren’t going to hand one off to anyone else. I know you have everything it takes to succeed – you just have to believe it too.
Category : Blog
