Today we’re going to talk about an idea that makes most entrepreneurs cringe, at least a little bit. It made me uncomfortable when I first came across it in lots of different business books I’d been reading at the time. The idea is very simple: your business should exist to serve you, not the other way around.
That’s a little selfish, isn’t it? YES, IT IS! Why else would you start a business if you couldn’t get what you wanted from it? The idea that this business that you’ve built should serve you, and your family, should be the point. So why is this such an uncomfortable notion? I think it’s because most of us put the things we love ahead of ourselves, which is sort of backwards because your business should be a device for providing those who you love (your family, your teammates, your customers) with increased happiness.
Let’s take a quick off-ramp and explore the alternative.
In my years of serving hundreds of entrepreneurs at my accounting firm, I’ve seen lots of entrepreneurs work way harder than they should have only to come to retirement age and not be able to exit or sell their business because they didn’t set their business up to serve them, they spent most of their adult life serving their business. Now they can’t retire, because they are financially trapped, and what’s worse they lived a very large part of their lives not getting what they wanted out of it. Most of these folks would have been way better off to just be an employee somewhere, at least then they might have been able to clock out a 5pm, take 3 or 4 weeks per year of holidays, be able to retire, and maybe have some savings to retire with.
Scary thought isn’t it. Why do we do this? It’s typically because we undervalue ourselves and most of us deploy the “blind faith” strategy in our businesses. That is, we work our buts off and “trust” that some higher point is going to take care of the rest. That’s not how this works. Everything in life is about setting intentions, everything in business is about setting goals.
Think about why you started your business. Was it for more freedom, to stop making money for other people, OR was it to become a slave to it, have less free time? I doubt it.
How about “to work my butt off and have trust that I’ll be happy” this is it more often than not.
The first thing you need to get clear on in order to build a business that serves you are your goals in life. This can be a tricky thing to figure out, you probably won’t have it resolved by the end of this podcast. The main tip that I’ve picked up on setting life goals is: GO BIG. That is to say, that your goal should be something that you cannot easily, or may never, fully achieve – but you can chip away at every day.
For example:
- I, Clayton Achen, will one day play guitar like John Mayer. I’ll probably never get there, but I know that I can chip away at it by committing at least 3 hours every week to my guitar. John Mayer has probably played a lot more than that every week of his life, but it doesn’t matter. That’s my goal and I can ship away it.
- Another one: I want my kids to always, for the rest of my life or theirs, want to come home. I can’t guarantee I’ll pull it off, but I know that by being good to them, and being present at my breakfast and dinner table every day, I stand a much better chance of hitting this one.
- Another: I want to travel and relate to the world a lot. I want to be away from the office and work for half the year. A friend of mine wrote in one of his books that he wants to be away a day/week, a week/month, and a month/year. That’s over half a year away, and since very few of my ideas are originals – I’ll go with that.
These thing conversations should be had with your family. What does your spouse want out of life, and how can you help them achieve it? Do you want to ski on Saturdays with your kids? Do your daughter want to play hockey on Fridays at 4pm, something you should commit to being at? Including family in these discussions is super important.
The same goes for if you have a business partner. My business partner, for example, wants to live in the mountains in the near future. These types of goals change the way we will structure out business.
Not that’s out of the way, we can start to relate our life goals back to how we setup our business. A business that I am a slave to, that doesn’t serve me but that I serve will not allow me to commit 3 hours / week to my guitar, breakfast, and dinner to my family, and half a year to do things outside of the office.
Now that I know what I want from my life, I will choose to build a business that serves those goals. I can put it on a timeline:
Year 1: I need 2 hours/week of guitar, breakfast and dinner with my kids is mandatory from the outset, but I will work some late evenings and forgo half my Saturdays for the first year, and maybe this year I can only take 2 weeks of holidays. That’s ok, I’m chipping away at it.
Year 2: things get better. I’m playing guitar as much as I want, perhaps even joined a band. Still having breakfast and dinner with my kids, taking 2 months off / year and no evenings or weekends. More movement towards the goal.
Understanding the goals in your life are going to help you answer the question of Why you actually started your business and WHY your business exists. Achen Henderson, for example, exists to help entrepreneurs and business leaders build great companies – that our WHY. Now you can start thinking about HOW you get this done, and who you do it for. Armed with this information, and the knowledge about what you need out of your business personally.
When you have these things as your guiding light in business, that is to say you are building your business to honor your goals in life, you are building a business that serves you. Any why would you do it any other way.
Show Notes:
Book – Making Money is Killing Your Business
To join the 3to5 Club – Calgary chapter, reach out to Clayton at clayton@achenhenderson.ca