If youre like most people who find themselves in business for the first time, you find yourself in an awkward scenario: you know almost everything you need to do for your clients and virtually nothing about what you need to do for your business. This is a common and normal situation, but one that can be mastered. Before you can truly decide what you need to do and how to act, you need to determine who you are. What kind of businessperson are you? There are two major divisions: a small business owner or an entrepreneur. Neither one of these is intrinsically better than the other but they are different, and you must know which one you are. A small business owner is a person who is self-employed and focuses on creating income. In some respects its like having a job from which you cant get fired. The goal of a small business owner is to get his job to be like Neil Diamonds or a surgeons: you only work when youre on. Someone else moves the piano, makes the arrangements, schedules the surgery, opens the curtain, or sterilizes the scalpel. Neil just sings and plays, the surgeon surges. And thats what a small business owner like yourself wants to do, just the thing for which you get paid. So the first step is to know what you get paid for. I suggest there are at least three things you do that make you money, but its up to you to define them. This is not as easy at it sounds. Typically small business owners think that every thing they do is important and so everything they do makes them money. But what really makes you money? In each of your cases it might be different. If you are fee-based, it probably includes: getting the client to sign the initial agreement; getting the client to approve a plan of action (agreeing to an expenditure, or anything in which they agree to become more involved), and any meeting with the client that furthers your relationship with them. Things that dont make you money include filling out tax forms, cold calls, meetings that arent about a plan of action, and decisions about phone systems, desks, filing cabinets, etc. When you are determining which three things you do that make you money, be honest and be ruthless. Once you know what you get paid for, your goal is to fill solid blocks of time doing nothing but those things that make you money. Imagine your best-ever deal. Then imagine if you could sign three or four of those kinds of deals back-to-back every Monday morning. And then every Monday all day long! To support a day like that, you have to make the other days work for you. Either you personally do all the things that dont make you money on those days, or you shift the responsibility (delegate) for those tasks to your support staff. For most small business owners, that support staff takes the form of a secretary or an office manager. As your business grows, you may increase the numbers of those kinds of employees or you could create strategic staff using independent contractors, part-time workers, or any combination that works for you. As you get more support, your goal then is to perform more days a week - do more new-client signings, more surgery, more things that make you money. In the case of the small business owner, when you quit or retire, your business ends at the same time. There is usually nothing to sell because you are the business. You are the person making all the financial decisions and completing all the transactions and relaying that information to the client. Your business is a job and when you quit, the job ends. An entrepreneur is someone who focuses not on creating income but on creating wealth. The small business owner does the work that makes the money. An entrepreneur gets the business to do the work that makes the money. Entrepreneurs create systems that are process-dependent, not people-dependent. They look at what they do that makes them money, analyze it, define it, systematize it, and then hire and train people to make money for them. The system brings in new clients, assigns them to workers, monitors the progress, and runs the day-to-day of the business. Entrepreneurs love to build businesses more than they love to perform the functions within the business that makes the money. It doesnt mean they dont perform those functions, it means they have others who also perform them, who are creating revenue for the entrepreneur that is greater than the income he or she could create for themselves if they were merely a small business owner. So, once you know whether you are a small business owner or an entrepreneur, you are ready to build your business, to make it create more income, and/or more wealth. You are ready to become a leader rather than just the producer you were when you started. |
