In a world that celebrates the new and exciting (or at least the loud and distracting), it’s easy to look at the overnight successes we see paraded on social media and our news feeds as a sort of status-quo.
Another Amazon millionaire “sharing secrets”…
Another Real Estate guru giving you insider training…
Another Health Coach sharing a weird diet…
The real answer, and the one that most people don’t want to hear, is the same one that generations of small business owners have learned the hard way – work hard, apply yourself, and success will follow.
Now, plenty of us have seen the bad side of this – “hard work” for many entrepreneurs is taken to mean “do it all yourself,” but the reality is this: the hardest work you will ever have to do is not fourteen hour days of labor within your company but envisioning what that company will develop into and the systems that it needs to be most successful.
No matter what your company does – build, manage, produce, import – as an owner, you can’t avoid the hard work and skip straight to success. No class can give you that, no YouTube video can teach it, and no book can mark it off your list.
In the end, entrepreneurs have a choice to make when choosing the path they will take to creating a business. While neither one is easy, the one that guarantees success as an end result is usually the one they don’t choose!
The only choice that leads small business owners to real success in their endeavors is the one that requires real thought. Understanding and building the systems they need within their company to afford them a framework of organization that can scale the business from a company of one to a company of one thousand.
So let’s get one thing straight, right away, shall we?
Opening a business is going to be hard work, no matter what choices you make. If you decide to fall on your sword and just slog through all the work as an operator instead of an owner, then you take responsibility for the entire operation and the actions of the business.
Mistakes made in that type of business are ones that you physically make (because you’re doing all the work, too) and then have to apologize for. The buck stops with you and the ability to scale and grow the business does, too.
On the other hand, if you decide to direct your energies in the early months of a new venture into areas of drafting and developing the operating processes that your new company will utilize – building the framework, if you will – then as you open that company and the sales begin to roll in, you have the script you need to follow firmly in your hand. You’ve drawn the map you need to hire new employees, onboard new clients, handle and process payments, and even written the job descriptions for each position that NewCo has to hire for.
Your days may still be fourteen-hour ones, but they represent fourteen hours spent refining how your business works, not simply working in your business fourteen hours a day. The success of any new company will be predicated upon how much foresight the owner has in planning for success and growth, not how well they can save a dollar.
Your decision to open a new company is a decision that requires massive amounts of action, no matter what path you choose. The owner who chooses to plan, strategize, and erect a framework for the new company to operate in is the owner that will be able to step out of those operations easily as the business grows.