How to Own Your Business and Not Let It Own You
The biggest misconception about leaving your job and starting a business is that you become your own boss. I’ll say this now to spare yourself of the surprise: You’re going to work more than you did as an employee to truly call yourself such a coveted title.
Being a business owner means rendering more hours per week than your job and doing all the work to keep your company running. Not just that, but there’s also a mixture of disappointment, discouragement, and stress caused by having nobody else to blame for your business’s failures.
And if you get consumed by stress, have no time for your own or your family, you’ll just revert to feeling like an employee. In short, your business has owned your life. These are the tips you should keep in mind to reverse such a situation.
1. Don’t rush into a partnership
Let’s face it. No matter how well you’ve known your spouse, best friend, or colleague, they will never be a perfect candidate when it comes to maintaining the venture you both own. They will only be enthusiastic at the thought of a startup. But that will change once they’ll discover how hard it is to run a business efficiently on a day-to-day scale.
A good partner is usually someone who both agrees and disagrees with your decisions and explains their logic for their support or contradiction. Not someone who agrees with you because they cannot think critically or disagrees for the sake of hindering progress.
You’ll eventually meet a good business partner later in your journey. That person will be the one you’ll trade places with from time to time as you make your business grow.
2. Keep trying
At times, things won’t go according to plan as you run your business. You will make mistakes and experience failure as a business owner. You’ll lose clients and gain new ones for fair and unfair reasons. But the negativities shouldn’t discourage or disappoint you into giving up. Because once you do, you’ve allowed your venture to win over your life.
What should you do? Learn and learn until you accumulate wisdom. Know what it takes to make your heart resilient. Train your mind to be more creative and resourceful in planning, innovation, and making strategies. Memorize all the stress-killing techniques to boost creativity. Keep on moving forward and never look back.
3. Build your own team
By the time you get the hang of managing everything in your company, it’s time to hire extra hands to lighten up your workload. Look for those who are honest, passionate, skillful, share the same vision as you, and have the capability to make the best decisions for your company.
Foster a working environment of trust by having faith in your subordinates first but never forgo the formalities and documentation. Then teach them how to be independent of their roles by gradually delegating all the work you do. Keep in contact to guide them in solving the most difficult problems. However, stay out of the simple stuff and let them handle those things.
4. Make yourself replaceable
Richard Fertig, chief executive of three companies and who once led a $4 billion hedge fund, said, “In order for your business to work for you, you need to make yourself redundant and replaceable.” To do this, you need to keep on empowering your team by taking vacations or breaks.
If there are a lot of problems happening due to your absence, you might need a little more time to let your workers adjust to the new routine. If there are no improvements or signs of independence no matter how much mentoring you provide, you might need to lay off some members and hire other more deserving talents.
5. Say goodbye
Once everything is okay and your business can run efficiently without you, it’s time for you to go. Well, it’s not going to be a permanent goodbye. You’ll still come back to make big decisions for your company and receive regular reports. What I mean is that this is the time to stop working for your business and let it work to provide you with all your needs and wants.
Being a boss isn’t a company position or type of character. It is a lifestyle. You can only call yourself a true boss if you only need to work for your company on an average of 10 hours per week, come anytime you want, and make any decisions when you feel like it while earning.
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