The most important thing you can do is make sure you are working on your business, but not from your business perspective. They tend to forget to work on it, suck it up as the wrong kind of role player and let themselves be driven by urgency and emotion day in, day out.
It may sound obvious, but working on your company is a great opportunity to think about strategy from a long-term perspective. Spend some time looking at your business in terms of finances and goals. Working on the business is a fantastic way to deepen the vision that your company has developed.
When you run a business, you must take a step back and think about your ROI and what you can do with your time. Time is money, and when you spend your time doing business that others do, you run out of planning and strategy to do the business.
When you’re busy writing bills and posting on Facebook, you don’t give yourself time to educate, learn and think. This is especially true if you spend time doing tasks that other people could do all the time and you cannot run your business. If you do accounting, clean, deliver and work, you will not grow your business or improve it.
If you spend time working on your company, you have the chance to tailor your solution to your target group and to differentiate yourself from the competition. Without development and learning, your company will stagnate and fall behind. Values are embedded in the DNA and the key to running a business, and they help inspire and empower people to do business and do well.
There are two ways to approach the role of business owners: as qualified employees or as executives. Employees are working on the business and doing whatever it takes to keep it going.
When talking to business owners, one of the recurring topics in all companies was the desire to spend more time on and not in their business. Most entrepreneurs concentrate on the inner work, the daily activities and tasks of their company. The buck stops with the entrepreneur because he has so many things to do and is so busy supplying material that he does not concentrate on any other aspect.
Entrepreneurs complain that they are so insecure in the stresses of daily business that they have little time to study the status of their business. They do not stop driving innovation, creating and setting new goals, or finding exciting ways to implement them. There are many advantages to taking time off work, not only in your company, in terms of developing growth potential, well-being and satisfaction of companies and individuals.
Are you fighting fires?
If, like most business owners, you are busy fighting fires day in and day out, thinking about nothing else, let alone focusing on the visionary work needed to propel your business forward. If there is a challenge many, many owners face and if it seems familiar to you when you listen, it is the difficulty of getting in the way of your daily work so that you can actually spend the day doing business rather than at night or the weekends, as many of you do. One of the reasons owners do the daily things is that they do it because it’s easy for them and they’re good at it.
It’s satisfying to be good at your job, but we all have to say goodbye to day-to-day customer work to run a business – which includes mentoring, difficult conversations with employees, biz – development and all of that stuff.
One problem many faces is the inability to move forward because they are too busy controlling everything. This is good for start-ups and the first years of an established company.
However, I have seen that many entrepreneurs who have successfully moved from stage one to stage two remain obsessed with maintaining the status quo, unable or unwilling to change their ways to grow and keep pace with unexpected spikes in growth.
My question to you
Are you working on or in your business? Do you feel tired and your business is not growing?
Take that step, delegate and work ON your business. You can do it!
