Did you start your business because you crave freedom?
Did you love the idea of being in charge and making all decisions?
Weren’t you sure you had a better way to get things done?
So what happened?
The more you grow the less time you have. Your business consumes you and you have decision fatigue.
Entrepreneurs are the only people on earth willing to work 80 hours a week just to avoid working 40 for someone else!
You use willpower and grit to keep going.
But willpower gets depleted like any other resource. When you’re tired you “buffer” to escape the stress.
So you’ll skip the gym and settle in for a night of comfort food or have that third glass of wine and stay up late binging on Netflix.
It doesn’t help.
The real solution is to fix the relationship with your business.
This means changing two things: how you THINK about your business and how you RUN it.
1. Recognize that your business is not you. You OWN the business. When your business is your identity, your brain thinks your survival is at stake and every decision feels like life or death. It’s a recipe for burnout.
2. Treat your business like it’s an investment and turn it into an ASSET. That means running every decision through this filter: “Will this increase the value of my business?”
When your business is an asset, you have options, and that’s the real freedom you want.
Freedom to scale your business, or turn it over to someone else to run for you. Maybe even to exit when the time is right.
Freedom to work as much or as little as you want and have the time (and money) you deserve in exchange for the value you add to the world.
So rethink the relationship with your business and you can do what I did:
Narrow your niche. Turn services into solutions that you market like products. Charge upfront to create positive cashflow. Generate recurring revenue. Simplify so you scale with systems instead of people.
When your business is an asset, it’s easy to love.
Learn how to change your relationship with your business so that IT works for YOU. So that you finally have the freedom and the time you wanted when you started it. Follow me on LinkedIn to learn how.