Do You Want A Job Or A Business?

This is an important point. Many people may have a skill, talent or a trade that they excel in and they think, “Hey I should start doing this for a living, be my own boss and make the profit for me rather than for my employer”.

They get a few licenses, set up a bank account and maybe buy some tools and equipment and then find some customers. The American Dream, self employed and all that.

Then the rude awakening comes that there is much more to running a business that the trade or skill that they brought to it! In addition to working the trade they also have to make sure that the accounting is kept up, create and distribute their advertising, make sales calls to establish new business and a host of other things that the business system did when they worked for a boss.

In my opinion this is what kills more micro and submicro businesses than anything else. They may have excelled at their trade and worked an 8 hour day when they had a boss, but once they became the boss they discovered that there are 168 hours in a week and that in order to stay on top of everything they needed to do they really needed to work all of them.

Put it this way, I used to have my desk facing into a corner of the living room but my wife got tired of looking at the back of my head from the time she got home after work til she went to bed so I thought I’d solve the problem. I got rid of the corner unit and bought a desk that faces toward one of the side walls. Now she can get the cool profile view from the time she comes home til she goes to bed.

Here’s the point to remember. A JOB is a place where you work for money; a business is a place where your money works for you.
In The E Myth Revisited author Michael Gerber points out that each of us actually has 3 business personalities that we have to deal with; the Entrepreneur, the Manager and the Technician.
This was a huge revelation for me! I discovered that for almost 5 years I’d been the Technician when in fact it was my job to be the Entrepreneur. My job isn’t to handle every little bit of creating the books, or to oversee every step of managing the company. My job is to create opportunities for other people to do those things.

When you take on the responsibilities of an Entrepreneur then your job is to create jobs for other people, not do all of the different jobs yourself. If you, the Entrepreneur, do your job correctly then after a little while you don’t even need to be there! If you put together a good staff and give them the right training and guidance and then get out of their way then your business should run even when you are on a book tour or at a trade show or on vacation.

Now anyone who knows me can tell you that I’m still struggling to do this. It’s a lot tougher than it sounds. A big part of your learning process is going to center around exactly what parts of the business you should and more importantly, shouldn’t, be involved with. Spend some time working on this concept. Read the E Myth series and then decide whether you want a job or a business. If it’s a job you want then give me a call, God knows I need the help.

"Do you want a JOB or a BUSINESS?" is an excerpt from Robert Morgen's new book The Spiritual Entrepreneur, which can be downloaded as a FREE Ebook (for a limited time) at http://spiritualentrepreneur.biz/