Have you heard the expression “working ON your business and not IN your business”? Do you understand what it means?
I use the word “solopreneur” instead of “entrepreneur”. What do you think I mean by that?
This past week I had two different discussions pertaining to these.
When starting a business the owner is typically wearing all of the hats within the business and focused primarily on finding business and completing the work. I call this survival mode.
Now, if your goal is to simply not work for someone else, enjoy total freedom of your schedule and to “make a living”, I call this being a solopreneur. If however, you have bigger goals and are going to require the hiring of employees, now you’re an entrepreneur and that changes everything.
More often than not, folks I encounter spend their entire careers in survival mode. They are working IN their business and just never have time or never really discover the value of working ON their business. This can work if you want to remain a solopreneur but, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you are going to have to focus on working ON your business.
So what does working ON your business look like? For me in my landscaping business it meant that instead of being on the job landscaping, I was in the office studying routes to minimize travel time, meeting with insurance agents to make sure we were properly covered and not overspending, meeting with attorneys to make improvements to our service agreements, meeting with accountants, bookkeepers and payroll services to make sure taxes were properly filed and creating helpful reports, working with HR people to create things like employee handbooks, verify compliance and more. This is just a sampling!
My last few years in business my employees were constantly complaining that I didn’t do anything. Many people around thought I was on easy street. Granted, there were many parts of these new challenges that I enjoyed, no one saw the long days and late nights of meetings and time behind the computer figuring out how to be more efficient, productive and profitable.
Right now, I have two different clients making this transition from solopreneur to entrepreneur and I am excited about being able to help them through it.