Building a business requires taking decisive action in achieving your business vision and professional goals: especially for small business owners – and many who are what I call solopreneurs – who, over the years, have become immersed in the daily operations of their businesses and working overtime to maximize sales and keep their business doors open.
But here’s the catch: you are working in your business, not on your business. Business owners must realize how they’re holding their companies back from achieving their true growth potential. When you’ve taken on the role of solopreneur, your business relies on you to close sales and generate income – this is keeping you from working on other areas of your business and causes you to miss opportunities to continue to develop and optimize your business operations, infrastructure, and more.
Strong entrepreneurial capability and skill help business owners build their careers from the ground up, and naturally, stepping down from working on the floor with their teams is often somewhat challenging for them. However, developing the leadership of your key employees will bring you confidence that they can handle effectively managing sales and your team.
Business owners who train and develop their high-potential employees into sales leaders and managers are working on their businesses. Not only will their leaders develop the capability to hit daily targets and objectives, but the business owners also get to work on other areas that need their focus. More importantly, the business will continue to grow after exiting because they’ve cultivated a highly productive work environment that is functional and self-sufficient.
In my latest video, I’m going more in-depth about the importance of small business owners learning to become the architect of their businesses rather than the rainmakers to achieve their full growth potential. You will find the complete video transcription below:
Good morning everyone: Todd Eppert, certified master business coach and exit planning advisor. I wanted to touch base with you this morning to help out with some of you solopreneurs out there or small business folks that are looking to really generate value in your business.
So, as a small business owner – the entrepreneur, oftentimes the business’s founder – one of the things that we often find ourselves doing is selling all the time: and it feels actually really good to sell. That’s how we grow our business and it’s how we really develop the business and how we generate income for ourselves and so we take a lot of pride and we really enjoy the close at times.
So here can be the problem in your business with that: if you become what’s called “the rainmaker,” which is the person that’s selling all the time that has all the customer relationships that’s generating all the income, while it does feel good, you’re actually working in your business rather than on your business.
So as you grow your business, when you’re in the business all the time, you’re going to struggle to break through ceilings of growth. You’ll get to a point where you become the bottleneck. So it’s much more important to become the architect in the business who’s working on the business: developing processes, hiring key people, training them up, so that when you’re ready to sell your business it can continue to grow – and when you’re ready to exit, you’ll have a much more successful exit because it’s not so dependent on you.
I was meeting with a client last week – who, when I met a couple years ago, he was a solopreneur – and he’s in the process of hiring once again as his business continues to grow, and it’s really important to follow a process when you’re hiring new a new key employee. Particularly, in small business, when you’re becoming a team of three, four, or five, it’s a significant add to the culture when you add a new person.
So this client is using a really specific process. He’s got two assessments: one is behavioral and one is industry-specific to help him pick some data points out for the potential prospect employee. Then, he’s having the person meet with all of the people on the team so that each person can give their input on what they think of the new Potential Prospect employee, and then the prospect employee gets an opportunity to come in and see the business for themselves.
All of those data points are going to give him not only the confidence but also all the data points he needs to make sure that he picks the right next person to join his team, and he’s becoming that architect: he’s working on his business, not in his business.
If you’d like to learn more about this, feel free to reach out to me. Again, I’m Todd Eppert and my number is 513-543-7271. Have a great day everyone.
