Business can be an engine for creating personal freedom as well as wealth. But for many successful small businesses it doesn’t feel that way.
You work the hardest, care the most and get paid last. Sometimes it feels like you are working for your team rather than the other way around. Sometimes you wish you could go back to when it was just you.
You’re not alone, a BIS survey carried out in 2012 found that a quarter (26 per cent) of businesses with no employees in 2012 had (at some point since start-up) previously employed staff within that business. (BIS Research 2012)
Why?
Because keeping your promise to clients through other people is hard, and most small business owners have never learned how to do it effectively – certainly not from the corporates they escaped from.
If you want to build your business without killing yourself or your team in the process, you need to scale, rather than simply get bigger.
Scaling means focusing everything that happens inside your business on making and keeping the promises you make to clients or customers. No more, no less.
Scaling means making and delivering on those promises profitably, efficiently and repeatably.
Scaling means doing all this through other people, letting the business personality shine through without stifling theirs.
Scaling means thinking completely differently about how your business works.
But when you get it right, you build a business you can step up with or step away from whenever you like. And everyone can enjoy the process.
