Most founders make this mistake (at least once). I made it too, when I was building my first business, Association Analytics.

Our business becomes our identity. Your self-esteem becomes tied directly to the success of the business.

How you feel about yourself varies widely depending on how the business is doing in the moment. It feels like everything’s on the line so you’re constantly scanning the environment for danger.

When someone makes a mistake, misses a deadline, or doesn’t follow up, you’ll over-react. Because you think it’s a reflection on you. You work yourself and everyone on your team to exhaustion.

But overworking and overmanaging is actually limiting your growth. It’s a warning sign and means your business is complex, not systematized and depends on you. This means it won’t scale.

For a while you can use willpower and grit to keep going, but you’ll start resenting your business and feel trapped by it. Your revenue will plateau. Staff will quit.

The solution is to separate your identity from your business. Start thinking of yourself as an investor. This allows you to be objective and make better decisions.

Your business is not who you are, it’s an asset you own. When you treat your business like an asset, you have options. You can scale the business yourself, hire someone to run it for you, or exit when you’re ready. That’s the kind of freedom we all want as founders.

The next steps are:

– Turn services into solutions and productize.
– Charge upfront to create positive cashflow.
– Generate recurring revenue.
– Simplify to scale with systems instead of people.

Uplevel the way you think about your business and the way you run it. You’re an investor and it’s an asset.