Are you building a business or did you just buy yourself a job? What most entrepreneurs want when they start a business is the personal and financial freedom that a scalable business offers them, but what they build is a business job that does the exact opposite.
I see this far too often.
When entrepreneurs start out, they have all these grandiose ideas. They are going to change the world, corner the widget market, open up stores across the country, or their particular version of “the dream”. The common thread is they are going to achieve personal and financial freedom they don’t have working for someone else.
The reality for many entrepreneurs is that they are worse off than if they had just continued to slog away in the corporate world, especially in the first few years. At least in the corporate world, they can close the door of the office and leave work behind instead of sacrificing all their time, energy and reinvested profits, to keeping up with the business.
You’ve created a monster you resent. Sound familiar?
Instead of achieving freedom, you are tied to a business that cannot function without you. Instead of achieving financial freedom, you are just getting by, making no more than they were as an employee but with more financial risk. Instead of success bringing more profits, it just increases your pain.
What’s worse is, the business is built entirely on your name, on your skills and on your efforts, so it cannot be sold down the road as a means of cashing out. When the you do decide to retire from the business, it’s of no value to anyone else without you in it.
A scalable business should enable you, the entrepreneur, to earn MORE than you could working at a 9 to 5 job, with greater flexibility. You should be able to draw a salary from the business AND benefit from profits over and above that. And when it comes time to retire, you have something that can be sold.
“A business without an exist strategy is really just a rope with a noose.” Aly Pain
The key to building a scalable business is designing your business model that allows you, the founder, to phase yourself out of the day-to-day operations, while getting back your start up capital plus interest. This is what enables you to serve a wider audience and build profitability that goes beyond what you alone can manage.
The first step to building a scalable business is hiring a team to handle the administrative tasks so you can focus on the things that only you can do. The next step is to find a way to scale your products and services, extending the end limit of your maximum capacity.
For example, if yours is a service business, you need to implement a train the trainer program to teach others to deliver your particular service on your behalf. If yours is a product business, you need to scale production and seek retail partners to increase your distribution reach.
For the solopreneurs who have no desire to grow beyond their org chart of one, that’s fine. It means you need to find other ways to stretch beyond your end limit, like webinars, e-books, virtual programs, etc. That may mean outsourcing trivial tasks to a virtual assistant or simply working more efficiently to increase your profits and flexibility in your schedule.
However you choose to scale your business, remember that you can never multiply your time – we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day! That means the only way to multiply your income is to multiply one of the other inputs. You choose.
Feeling resentful of your business and tired of being a slave to it? Book your Business Brainstorming session now!