The goal of every business owner should be to grow their business to a point where they can step away from the day-to-day operations, and be there to act as a guide.
The ultimate dream of many (which is achieved by few) is to completely step away, sell the business for a massive pay-day, and then either go retire on a tropical beach somewhere, or more likely start another business
Whichever is your goal, getting to either point requires good systems, well documented processes and procedures, role descriptions and scorecards, and most importantly, some really great people.
For the start-up entrepreneur building their first business, these are usually the last things on their mind.
Typically they could not care less about doing organization charts, or writing out processes.
They just want to bring in some cash!
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Priority numero uno for any business is ‘get the cash.’
Without the cash, you can’t advertise, you can’t hire, you can’t buy inventory or manufacture… you can’t survive very long.
But once you have steady sales coming in, you do need to think about these more ‘corporate’ sounding things if you want to scale.
The man who really influenced me to start thinking this way the most was Michael Gerber
.
You might have heard of his book, The E-Myth.
I first came across it back in 2009, and at the time thought it was pure nonsense.
Less than 20 pages in I thought it was just theory, with nothing practical which I could actually use. At the time my business was grossing less than $20,000 / year, and I was in pure survival mode.
5 years later, things had changed.
My business was grossing more than 1,000 times that amount. I had hundreds of staff around the world. And boy, was I feeling those growing pains.
The student was ready.
I got a hold of Michael Gerbers material again – this time some of his audio books – and his message really spoke to me. I saw the light, and realized his way of thinking about and running a business was what I’d been missing. I knew his teachings would be able to help me scale to the next level. And they did.
I don’t have a link to that audio program unfortunately. But I did find this video of him on Youtube, which over the years I must have watched a dozen times.
Enjoy: