Becoming a Strategic Business Owner
Becoming a Strategic Business Owner
by Jonathan Goldhill
Your goal as a business owner should be to design a company that is distinct from you and quite candidly, works in your absence. You should create a separate cash flow entity, not merely a job for yourself. It should pay you a healthy salary plus a return on your investment of money, time and effort. You should build equity. You should build wealth. Bottom line, your role as owner should be to shape, manage and grow this independent and enduring asset - your business.
Your enterprise should function without you, not because of you. I know this sounds bizarre, but hear me out. While you can be the brains behind the enterprise, you should not be like Hercules trying to hold up the entire weight of the company. Your will be crushed.
Your buiness should work harder so you don't have to. You should be able to make money everyday without having to work everyday. Your should invest more braind equity and leadership equity and much less sweat equity into your company. Your business should be a product of your brain, not your brawn.
You should strive to build a business that does not enslave you and does not rely on your being present every minute of every day doing all the thinking, deciding, worrying, and working. You must adopt a new way of thinking and acting.
In short, you must become a strategic business owner. Specifically, you must learn to adopt a CEO mindset; systematize and document your business; lead more and work less; create a simple business plan; utilize the leverage of marketing; effectively manage your greatest asset, your people; and learn to let go. You must transform the way you see yourself and your business. You must begin to think differently.
As a strategic business owner, your primary aim should be to develop a self-managing and systems-oriented business that still runs consistently, predictably, smoothly, and profitably while you are not there. You should shape and own the business system (an integrated web of processes) and employ competent and caring employees to operate the system.
You should document the work of your business so that you can effectively train others to execute the work. You must make yourself replaceable in the technical trenches of your business.