The Pain of Owning Your Business

Whenever I engage with a new small business owner, I give them a questionnaire about the current state of their business. One of the questions I ask is what they are expecting to receive from working with me. I found this client's answer to be insightful into the state of small business owners everywhere, and therefore, I decided to share it. See if you can relate to this person.

"Generally speaking, I operate as a salesman, estimator and project manager who happens to own a business. Those three hats in and of themselves make up a full-time job. But in addition to that, I am both the creator and repository for most business procedures, hiring and disciplinary actions, safety standards and protocol, training processes, IT management, software management, software implementation, job costing, profitability measurement, profit and loss and balance sheet digestion, and finally, the assessment of all mentioned measurement criteria and utilization of same for correction of activities and processes to hopefully induce a better outcome in the future.
In a nutshell, I have little idea where to focus my attention on a daily basis. Generally, I work on revenue generation and those things that are urgent. My hope is that working with Business Mastery will help educate and narrow my thinking and focus about my business so that I can have a more impactful relationship with it.”

Small business owners are atlas-like because they carry so much on their shoulders. They are some of the best people you know, yet they operate under incredible pressure. They are the reason I love what I do, helping them to overcome these obstacles and make their business serve their life instead of run their life. That's why when I start working with a small business owner I always take them through the process of truly understanding all the different hats that they wear and how their Entrepreneurial mindset affects them in both their business performance and their quality of life. Once they identify all the different roles they are playing in their business we then go through and determine which of them they should actually be doing and which ones they should never ever touch again and start the process of organizing those positions in such a way that they can either be outsourced to an expert in that skill or they can be handed over to an employee with the necessary systems, tools, procedures, training and standards to enable them to actually truly take on that role without the business owner continually having to step back into that role to micro manage that employee. 

This process becomes the business owners path to freedom, their only way of actually achieving the dream of their business actually adding to their life instead of sucking the life right out of them. When a business owner is working with me and I see this start to click first in their thinking and then start to transform their business, well, let's just say It keeps me excited to go to work every day.
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For more information, visit my page Who & Why or send me an email at sethgetz@gmail.com.