Working On Your Business Rather Than In It

Imagine this if you can. You're in your business. You're answering phones, talking with team members, fighting fires, juggling all the elements of your business at once—marketing, sales, management, operations, finances, cash flow, debtors, creditors, suppliers and more. You're extremely busy and you've just realized that you forgot to eat lunch again, and someone unexpected has just walked in the door. Unfortunately, that means you're going to have to spend time with them, instead of completing that paperwork you really wanted to finish. Oh well, you'll take it home and do it tonight.  Sound familiar?

This is what working in your business means.  You're in the midst of it and trying to handle everything and be everything to everybody.

Picture this instead.  You've taken a few steps back from your business and you're looking at it objectively, saying, “Without me, what would happen?  What do I want to happen? What needs to be done to free me up from working in it all the time?”  If your business were a lump of clay, what would you mold it into?

Just thinking about it, you can sense the huge difference this could make. Imagine taking some time away from day-to-day tasks and looking at your business in the long term.  Think of the creative ideas or opportunities you could come up with! This is working on your business. The secret is not to work in your business always, but to work on it.

Begin with the End in Mind

Steven R. Covey, in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People , says “begin with the end in mind.”   In other words, whenever you start a process, understand exactly what the end point is before you start.

Think about that in the context of a business.  How many business owners actually do that?  Why did you go into business?  Did you like to bake and that is why you started a bakery? Did you want financial independence?  To be your own boss?  To spend more time with your family?  Is it happening for you?  The fact is, most of us jump or fall into business. Before we know it, we are so busy that we have no time to think about what we want from the business, how it will be shaped and what it will be like the day we retire or sell it.  End-in-mind thinking makes a profound difference.  Let's take two different hamburger restaurants for example.

When Ray Kroc founded McDonald's he had absolutely no intention of working behind a counter.  In fact, he never even made a hamburger.  He began with a different end in mind.  He envisioned thousands of McDonald's stores around the world, each doing exactly the same thing in a predictable manner. Knowing that, he knew he wouldn't be able to work in them, hence they would have to work without him!  He then developed processes and systems structured around how to hire people, the color the restaurants should be, the way a restaurant should be managed, right down to the way they should heat their buns.  All of this occurred by having a vision, determining what needed to be done to get there, and then carefully going over every little detail.

Contrast that with owners who run a typical hamburger place. They're doing it, doing it, doing it, every single day.  These businesses depend on the owner doing everything, including ordering the goods to make the hamburgers, doing the stock control, frying the fries, grilling the burger, buttering the buns, wrapping it all up, ringing up the sale and hoping to make ends meet at the end of the day. If making burgers, ordering supplies, waiting on customers and doing all of the financial work is what you envisioned, then go for it. But often this isn't your vision and you want a business that can run without you, the owner, and can be sold.

As Michael Gerber points out in his book The E Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It , it's a myth that most businesses are started by entrepreneurs.  Gerber suggests that most businesses are actually started by a person suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.  That is, instead of creating a business that can work without us, we create a business that is us . A business that often becomes all-consuming.  And worse yet, when it all becomes too much, we sell our most precious asset for far less than it would have been worth if we had started with the end in mind.

But it doesn't have to be that way. There really is another path.  Consider again the true purpose of your business.  Once you get the thought processes of beginning with the end in mind going, the true purpose comes out.  Isn't the purpose of a business to create life— for you and for the people with whom you interact?  

Creating “The Way We Do It Here”

An important step to start working on your business is to simply develop systems for everything.  A number of things happen when you do this.  First, you don't have to perform every process.  Second, it empowers your team members to take on more responsibility.  And third, when you systemize, you automatically develop what we call “the way we do it here.”

A central theme in Gerber's E-Myth is that most businesses fail or never reach their full potential because their owners spend too much time doing the work that the business does, rather than managing and growing it.  Creating a systemized way of doing things not only helps make the business run in a totally predictable way, it also makes your business worth much more because it doesn't have to rely on you to operate it.

Think about this concept by comparing the local hamburger restaurant to McDonald's.   In which company would you rather own stock?  McDonald's, most likely.  Why?  Because McDonald's makes better hamburgers?  Probably not.  You'd pick McDonald's shares because the company works like clockwork no matter which restaurant you visit.  They all have completely systemized processes that make them consistently high quality and very successful.

What Happens When You Get to the End ?

If you really can begin with the end in mind, and create a systemized way of getting there, then it means that the business must have an end point. That is, there must be a point when you can stand back and say, “Now it's finally done.”

If at that point you decide to sell the business, you're handing over a business worth many times more than when you started, simply because you thought about and developed the systems that allow the business to function successfully without you.  And if you decide to stay involved in the business in some way, you know that it can function independently of you.  It's not your life. You've developed a business that you're a part of. Yet you're still apart from it.

Walt Disney tells the story of being asked by a child if he drew Mickey Mouse. “I had to admit I do not draw anymore,” said Disney.  “Then do you think up all the jokes and stuff?” asked the child.  “No, I don't do that either,” admitted Disney.  Finally, the child looked at him and said, “Mr. Disney, just what do you do?”  “Well, sometimes I think of myself as a little bee,” Disney explained.  “I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody.  I guess that's the job I do.”

Good thinking Walt! The legacy (the bits of pollen if you will) that Disney left behind still exists today—and will for a long time to come.  He created systems and processes that resulted in an indelible “way we do things here” that includes empowered team members sharing a truly magic culture and passion for what they do, and millions of happy customers who come back again and again.

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