Eric was a surgeon with a thriving medical practice. His
patients loved his calm and quietly confident manner in all their interactions.
He was technically at the top of his profession. His surgery calendar was
booked solid. So why then did he reach out to our business coaching company to
get help?
Because Eric felt stuck--unclear how to grow his practice
and wean it off of its crippling dependency on him and his wife Tina to keep it
running smoothly.
They had young twin boys, and older daughters too, and the
practice just demanded so much of their time and attention. And the stress was
impacting Tina's health too.
They knew there must be a better way to run and grow their
business, but they just didn't know how. The average business owner stops at
this point. He or she fears that the only way to grow is to give up more of
their life. To work harder; produce more; turn up the treadmill even faster.
The thing is, working harder, longer is not only a limited
road, it isn't a sustainable one. The more your business counts on you to
produce to keep it running, the more reliant it becomes on your daily presence.
Instead, what we showed Eric and Tina was how to work less,
by getting the business to produce more. This meant maturing their staff,
implementing systems, and focusing their company's resources of time, attention
and money on those fewer things that yielded a better return. Essentially this
formula for growing a business the right way says scaling your business doesn't
require you to do more of what you know, instead it requires that you stretch
to do less, but make sure that the "less" that you and your staff do
matter more, both for the short term success of the business and for the longer
term development of the business as a business.
This was the starting point for Eric and Tina, and they
actively implemented what they learned. Two years later they had grown their
revenues from $3 million/year to over $4.6 million per year. During that same time,
Tina worked herself completely free of the practice, and Eric, he reduced his
working hours by 20 hours a week.
The reason I share their story with you is because they are
likely a lot like you. You're driven to succeed but feel stuck as to the best way
forward. You carry the weight of your business on your shoulders without
complaint and are the linchpin that holds everything together.
You work hard to grow your business, what you may not have
realized is that one of the most powerful chains holding you back from
succeeding on the scale you want is the way you've designed your business in
the first place. Your business's heavy reliance on you, which may have been
necessary when you first launched your business, has become a major weakness.
And still I know there are going to be some business owners
who say, "David, I hear what you're saying and agree, I should build a
business, not a job, but my business is different. If you knew my business...
my industry... then you'd see that it just isn't possible to build my company
to not need me. It's special."
What these unfortunate business owners never realize is that
by asserting their business's specialness, they've locked themselves into being
involved in every detail of that business. Their belief that their business
can't be weaned off its reliance on them since it is so specialized,
complicated, or unique is one of the most expensive limiting beliefs they could
ever own. It literally costs them millions of dollars of lost growth.
What's more, it also costs them their freedom as they become
trapped in the very business they once launched to help them become free.
You can and should work to not just grow your company, but
most important of all, to do it in a way that consistently reduces its reliance
on you or any other one key individual staff member.
In fact, I strongly encourage you to make the concrete
decision that one of the stated goals of your business is to build it to be
sustainable independent of you.
This is good for your employees (i.e. gives them more
opportunity, greater stability, and room to grow); this is good for your
customers; this is good for your suppliers and vendors; this is good for your
investors.
If you would like to get more detailed steps to wean your
business off of its dependency on you, then I encourage you to join me for a
special webinar training I'm doing that's coming up very soon.
Remember, the starting point for building a
different and better business is a decision you make to intentionally grow it
in a smarter manner.
Written By David Finkel
David Finkel is co-author of Scale: Seven Proven Principles
to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back (written with Priceline.com
co-founder Jeff Hoffman), and one of the nation's most respected business
thinkers. A Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek best-selling author of 11
business books, Finkel's weekly business owner e-letter is read by 100,000
business owners around the world. Finkel is the CEO of Maui Mastermind, one of
the nation's premier business coaching companies. Over the past 20 years,
Finkel and the other Maui coaches have personally scaled and sold more than $2
billion worth of businesses.
He can be reach on Twitter@DavidFinkel
