I’ve seen plenty of people taking the wrong approach to starting their new business and it affects them so bad that their new venture turns into the job from hell.
These people are entering the world of business from a technical background e.g. an Electrician who worked for a large company and is now starting out in business doing electrical work. The problem is that they’re focusing mostly on the electrical work (the technical work).
So lets put that scenario into perspective, lets say you’re living that scenario right now, you have plenty of work on the go because you are good at what you do and your customers recognise that and call you back for repeat work. But now you have a problem, you have to answer calls and set appointments, keep the books, take care of all the marketing and advertising, maintain premises (if you’re not working from home), maintain vehicle and cover such costs as insurance, assets and consumables, and while you’re caught up doing that, oh yeah, the technical work.
You don’t have enough time to do everything and you have enough work to go full time in the technical trade so you decide to employ an office-all-rounder to take care of the day to day office duties.
Now you have all of those expenses mentioned earlier plus a new wage to pay, a wage that is not primarily doing the work that brings in the income. So your one job now has to support your wage, your employees wage, the expenses, and make a profit on top. You must be charging like a wounded bull to pull that off. In most cases, it’s not happening and you (the business owner) is the one who suffers.
The office-all-rounder is not going to take care of marketing, so what happens when your current workload reduces? Marketing is your job so you commit to doing it in your spare time. Oops, there’s not enough spare time to start learning all about marketing and so you are stuck further in a rut. When your workload reduces you spend some time on marketing, but what happens if your other current jobs are all finishing at the same time? Then you are stuck for a while with no jobs, no income, and you still have to support your family, your employee, your assets and consumables and various other maintenance and bills.
Let’s recap what you’ve done. You started out working for someone else where all of (or most of) your expenses were paid for and you had a regular weekly or fortnightly income without the worry of where your next job will be or whether your bills and general business activities are being taken care of. So you swapped your regular income job for the same thing but with a huge load of new worries stressing you out and probably the same amount of pay or less because of all those new expenses you have to cover and you’re stuck in that position. You swapped a regular job for a job from hell.
If you are stuck in that position or were thinking of going down that path, it’s not worth it. So what can you do if you’re already living that? You need to make a decision: Do you like doing the technical trade work, or would you rather be a leader (who probably spends most of the time indoors)? Let’s have a look at two options…
- You like the technical trade work and don’t want to be stuck in a cosy office. Your options are to continue working your business until something happens like you get sick and can’t work, then you have to let your office-all-rounder go as there’s not enough income, and it all goes pear-shaped from there as you could imagine. Or you could go back to working for someone else. You can then negotiate a better rate of pay than what you were getting in your previous employed position, so it’s not as bad, or…
- Employ a technical trade person to take over your work. Now you have given away a decent chunk of your income to the new employee but you have just freed up all of your time to bring in more work. Now, before you start thinking of doing the new work yourself, think about this… Do you want to get stuck into the same rut again of tying yourself up with too much work and not having anyone to take care of running the business? That’s like starting your car (the business) and setting it off down the road by itself, who’s at the wheel of your business? Who is driving your business forward on the road to success?
Here I have explained a working example of what you’ve most likely heard “You need to work ON your business, not IN your business”. That saying is very significant for almost all businesses. You need to get out of the ‘follower’ mindset, and become a ‘leader’. Start ‘leading’ your business to success, build a team and ‘lead’ your team to complete the technical work successfully. If you get very good at leading, you have every chance of becoming one of the biggest in your industry (with you at the top). Always set your sights high, make goals and see them through to completion.
This post has been about changing your mindset to work ON your business, not IN your business. Do you agree with what I’ve said? Do you have anything to add? Please comment below…
Tags: business, follower, in your business, job from hell, leader, mindset, on your business
I liked your article. It was painfully reminiscent of lessons learned except my lesson required me to sell in one country and delivery work in another….ouch. I also don’t remember anyone else talking about this issue. Good job.
Excellent article! I love the conclusion!
I just have a couple of comments:
Whether to get a worker to do it and become a leader/manager depends on the quality of your work – if you offer something irreplaceable, the replacement worker will not give deliver the same value that people like in you. I have witnessed this in a number of hair salons, medical clinics, and even law and PR firms. The founder was amazing. He or she could do anything and thus could afford to charge those outrageous fees. But now, they have trained young professionals to do “the same” work, and they are almost as good – but not just as good, or as flexible, or as great with clients.
If you choose to pace yourself, and do your great work but not grow exponentially – you can still manage with just an “office-all-rounder”.
Looking forward to the future posts,
Milen
Yes, getting the worker to achieve the equivalent results is a challenge, I would suggest plenty of training and constant involvement in the day to day to keep the level of service at a good rate. Then you have to make sure you don’t smother the worker, so that’s a bit catch22.
Positive reinforcement and an upbeat attitude, also if you come in from the leader position in the first place then the level of service comes from your workers from day 1 and you can only improve on that.
Aye,
This be like a curse to the SME / Micro Biz.
When to let go of the crap you hate, and how to outsource it without dropping your quality.
There are now businesses that provide a tailored solution to this, through the development of outsource models that are very effective.
Shameless plug of my friend Louisa, who runs a consultancy doing just that.
Gave us some of the most important keys to get out of “business hell” a while back, just by telling us what we could hire out and what we couldn’t and what steps to take to get the monkeys off our backs.