Work Smart, Not Hard

Business owners are one of the hardest working groups of people out there. They are tough go-getters that can solve any problem, overcome any crisis and out-work any employee. These characteristics are a key reason that your business is such a success – they are also the key reason why it’s so hard for you to grow the business.  You are so used to doing everything that you have made yourself into the most indispensable employee of your  business. As Michael Gerber, author of the E-Myth and other books, put it, “You don’t own a business, you own a job!”
 
If your business depends on you directly to make a product or close a sale or perform a service, then the growth of your business is limited because there is only one you. Once you run out of hours in the day to do the work, you can’t take any more clients or handle any more customers.
 
Your job is to organize the business so that the work can be done by others in a consistent manner. Look at McDonald’s. Whether you get a Big Mac in Seattle or New York City or Miami or Phoenix it’s the same. Not because Ray Kroc is in each of those places making it but because long ago he put down on paper how it should be done and hired people to do it exactly that way over and over again.
 
To truly be a business owner and not a job owner, you need to be able to set up your business so that you work on it not in it.