My own experience and seeing all these other business owners struggling led me to continue to read and study - convinced that there had to be a better way!
I read book after book, trying to find the way to create a business that I loved. A business that worked for me, rather than the other way around.
Michael E. Gerber taught me, “If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!” (The E-Myth Revisited)
Mike Michalowicz explained that “It’s not about doing more with less. It’s about doing less with less to achieve more.” (Clockwork)
Gary Keller and Jay Paasan shared that “It’s not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it’s that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.” (The One Thing)
From the legendary marketer Perry Marshall I discovered that “...massive action without a really great strategy gives you only more problems.” (80/20 Sales and Marketing)
So as I began working with more and more clients, I began to uncover a strategy for actually becoming the CEO of your business…not just having the title.
I’ve come to call this strategy the Find Your 20 Process.
It’s a way to look at everything in your business and how you relate to it through the eyes of the 80/20 Principle.
It helps you to “find” the 20% of things in your business that generate the majority of the results. Then it provides a process for staying focused on those things and actually accomplishing them.
Author Cal Newport explains what happens in the absence of a process for identifying what’s truly important in our work when he said, “In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.” (Deep Work)
That is exactly what is happening with these entrepreneurs. Because they don’t have a clear sense of what is valuable, they simply do “lots of stuff in a visible manner.”
They believe 12-hour days are “part of the deal” in owning a business.
With each business owner I work with, my resolve to ensure they are able to create freedom in their life and business grows.
I view business as a tool and a resource to serve the needs of not only the customer, but also the owner (that’s you!).