When you started your business, chances are you were looking to branch out on your own and build a business with the ideas, brand, and strategies you dreamed about while you worked for someone else. Starting your own business was a chance for you to be your own boss.
Then reality hits: After a few years of growing your business you find yourself doing a ton of work by yourself (even if you have a team).
You may have started a business but you ultimately just created a JOB for yourself: A commitment to work 8 hours a day, 10 hours day – even sometimes longer – for a wage. Although there’s certainly nothing wrong with having a JOB, most business owners desire something bigger.
Here are some simple steps you can take right away to start making that transition.
- Define what you’re doing for your “job” right now. Define what a business legacy means for you. List all the changes that need to be made in order to transition from one to the other.
- Get a coach, mentor, consultant, or business transformer to help you through the transition. They’ll not only bring clarity to the steps you need to take, they’ll bring accountability.
- Immediately raise your expectations on everything in your business: raise your expectations for what you require of your team, for the level of service you provide to your customers, for the quality of your work, for the way you communicate your brand, for what you expect from your vendors. Be sure to communicate this raised expectation to everyone and tell them why you’re raising your expectations.
- Imagine your bigger business vision as clearly as possible and then communicate it clearly and frequently to your team.
- Reconnect with your team regularly to keep bringing them back to your vision. (Chances are, they’ll need frequent reminders since it was your dream, not theirs).
- Examine the systems and process in your business right now and make sure they can scale up to your bigger business. Rebuild them if necessary. (Often, systems and processes are built to address a current need and they don’t scale well if not intentionally built that way).
- Outsource and delegate more of your work. This may be challenging for you to give up control of your work but it could be one of the most important actions you take because you’re freeing yourself up to work on your business instead of in your business.
If you feel like you have a job instead of a business, it’s time to make a change. As I explain in my book Secrets Of Business Mastery, there are 12 areas where you can transform your business to transform it from a job into a legacy. Use the simple steps I described in this blog post as a fast start but then be sure to go deeper with the strategies in my book.
