As business owners or individuals who want to go into business or be an entrepreneur there’s an important aspect of knowing who you are in your business and what it means when I say in and on your business. So that doesn’t seem very clear to you but it will at the end of this podcast.
What I mean by working in or working on your business are two completely different aspects of the person or the business owner that you are in your business.
When you spend time in your business doing the daily essentials for your business, answering the phone for your business, doing the emails for your business, there’s a list of things that you do in your business. Working inside, making the things happen inside your business are the more tedious aspect of your business. So when you’re working in your business, you understand the importance of your business. Which is very very important. But working in your business doesn’t always mean that’s profitable. And being in business we need to be profitable. And so as a business owner or an individual that wants to run a business or own a business, you have to decide if you’re gonna work in your business, doing the daily essentials or if you should be working on your business.
I learned this because that’s the only way I knew. When I first started, I was continuously working in my business because I had to, I didn’t have anybody that could run the daily aspects of the business so I was working in my business all the time. And I wasn’t able to focus on working on my business.
When I say working on your business, this is like marketing. This is all the extra things that you do to drive people to your business. You wanna be working on your business because when you’re working on your business, you’re growing your business. And sometimes as business owners we get so consumed at what’s going or taking place inside the business and doing the inside aspects of the business that we don’t have time to focus on the business. Making more growth, building more growth. And this is challenging because if you’re a one man show, you’re doing both. But you’re probably only focusing on working inside of your business because you have to get the daily task done. They have to be done, right? And so we forget how to grow our businesses and working on our businesses. And so we get sucked back in, doing these tedious tasks that don’t provide profit. And that’s where we wanna go with this podcast, talking about when you look at your daily routine, working inside your business or working on your business. You have to be doing tasks that are going to bring you profit, are going to bring new people to you, are going to bring money to you, because that’s essentially why we opened a business, is to make money. There’s a lot of other reasons why people are in business but a lot of people go into business because they want to make a profit and that requires an entrepreneur working on their business not working inside all the time.
Do I believe a business owner needs know everything about their business? HECK YES.
As a business owner, you should know everything that happens inside of your business. You need to know. You need to know what’s taking place, you need to see what’s working, you need to see what’s not working. It is important as a business owner. I believe that you know what’s going into your business and the inside. This doesn’t mean you are doing everything inside the business, but you at least know it. You have to be the expert in the business and know it, understand it. The more you know what’s happening inside your business, the more you know how to work on your business. If you understand what it takes every single day for your business to run smoothly, to operate the way it should, and have it function at the high capacity that it needs to, you then can move forward and work on your business.
I understand there are a lot of entrepreneurs out there it’s a one man show. I get that. But you have to understand working in and on your business are two different things when you’re talking about business growth. A lot of business I see and I work with are not growing because that entrepreneur is working inside the business all the time. And can’t focus on building the business. And I see this. And that’s what I always ask an entrepreneur. I want to know what they are doing everyday. I write down all the tasks that they do every single day. And then I go through the list with them, and I see what of those tasks are bringing in profit. And when those tasks aren’t bringing in any profit, we have to start asking questions of what is going on. How can we build the growth and how can we build the profit? For the business owner, it’s not necessarily having to work in the business but working on the business.
So this is an exercise I do with my clients. I have them list everything that they do in a day, and this takes a long time! If you look at your whole entire day and your career and you list out what you do, it’s important. You need to see what you do on a daily basis. Is it worth your time. That’s a whole other podcast that I need to is what is your time worth. But in this exercise let’s talk about, what do you do? Write everything down. Categorize it. Really understand what you do everyday and then take a day off take a little break, come back to that list and I want you to highlight what makes you profit. What are those tasks you wrote down bring you profit? You have to be focusing on building your business. We don’t have to say profit, we can just say business growth. You gotta at least have 2-3. You need to have items, as a business owner, that you are doing that are gonna increase your business success. So right now, think about it, close your eyes. Think about what you do everyday. How are you spending your time? What are those tasks? And start brainstorming if you’re working in or on your business. Once you understand this, you will really want to re-organize your day on what you really need to be working on internally and externally in your business. And when you get these two aspects down, you will have a better understanding of what your role is as the business owner. And the business owner is the person that has a vision of such success and opportunity, and you are the power house of these brainstorming sessions so you have to build your business and that means you have to work on your business and not in your business.
Have fun with this. Know that this is a lot of information and this is homework for you. But this is good homework. This is going to give you a platform of how much you’re working in your business and on your business.
