Small business coaching

It is self-evident that businesses, like people, are supposed to grow, and with growth, comes change.

Unfortunately, most businesses are not run according to this principle. Instead, most businesses are operated according to what the owner wants as opposed to what the business needs.

And what the technician who runs the company wants is not growth or change but exactly the opposite. He wants a place to go to work, free to do what he wants, when he wants, free from the constraints of working for The Boss.

Unfortunately, what the technician wants dooms his business before it even begins.

The boss is dead (not literally) and you, the technician, are free at last. You can do your own thing in your own business. Hope runs high. The air is electric with possibility. It’s like being let out of school for the summer your new found freedom is intoxicating.

In the beginning, nothing is too much for your business to ask. As the technician,  you’re accustomed to “paying your dues”. So the hours Devoted To The Business during infancy are not spent grudgingly but optimistically. There’s work to be done, and that’s what you’re all about. After all, your middle name is work.  “Besides”, “ you think, this work is for me .”

And so you work. 10, 12, 14 hours a day. Seven days a week.  Even when you’re at home, you’re at work. All your thoughts, all your feelings, revolve around your new business. You can’t get it out of your mind.  you’re consumed by it, totally invested in doing whatever is necessary to keep it alive.

But now you’re doing not only the work you know how to do but the work you don’t know how to do as well. You’re not only making it but you’re also buying it, selling it and shipping it. During infancy, you’re a master juggler, keeping all the balls in the air.

It’s easy to spot a business in infancy –  the owner and the businesses are one and the same thing. If you remove the owner from an infancy business, there will be no business left. It would disappear!

It’s even named after you – “Joe’s place,” “ Tommy’s joint,” “ Mary’s Fine Foods” –  so the customer won’t forget you’re The Boss.

If you want to work in a business, get a job in somebody else’s business! But don’t go to work in your own. Because while you’re working, while you’re answering the telephone, while you’re baking pies, while you’re cleaning the windows and the floors, while you’re doing it, doing it, doing it, there’s something much more important that isn’t getting done. And it’s the work you’re not doing, the strategic work, the entrepreneurial work, that will lead your business forward that will give you the life that you’ve not yet known. As the saying goes “working on your business instead of working in your business”

In a business that depends on you, on your style, on your personality, on your presence, on your talent and willingness to do the work, if you’re not there why of course your customers will go someplace else. wouldn’t you? Because in a business like that what your customers are buying is not your business’s ability to give them what they want but your ability to give them what they want. And that’s what’s wrong with it!

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business- you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic! And, That’s not the purpose of going into business.

The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people. The purpose of going into business is to expand beyond your existing Horizons. So you can invent something that satisfies a need in the marketplace that has never been satisfied before so you can live and expanded stimulating new Life.

And that is where a business coach can help by identifying areas maybe to do with sales, marketing, networking etc, and by setting goals that will inspire, motivate and contribute to moving you from where you are now to where you want to be in the shortest possible time.

You just can’t play the role of the technician and ignore the strategic entrepreneurial work, because you are unprepared to play and learn the skills needed!

If your business doesn’t grow it will die

excerpts from E-Myth by Micheal E. Gerber