Are You Working On or In Your Business?
I work and live for my lifestyle. I made tough choices and many poor choices throughout my life. At a very early age, due to some very bad things that happened to me, I decided I would not allow others tell me how I can live or what I can do.
That decision however empowering it was did not actually take fruition into my personal life until 50 years later. But in my business life, by the time I was 18, I had control over who I would work for, which was only ever going to be myself.
Deciding to own your own business is in my opinion, the best decision you can make. It gives you control over your destiny. It allows you to be creative, to innovate, and to help others.
When you become a real estate agent, you are opening up your own business. You are not an employee. You are a business owner, an entrepreneur.
It is an exciting time to start your own business. Whether you started your entrepreneurial journey yesterday or 50 years ago, there are some mindset shifts you can still make.
What does working IN your business mean?
When you are working in your business you are in the trenches, wearing all the hats, handling all the stress, managing your filed, your contracts, your lead generation, your social media outreach and all your marketing, handling your outsourcing, doing the sales calls, taking care of your buyers and sellers, putting out tiny and big fires over and over again, waking up earlier than anyone else in your business and going to sleep after everyone else does.
You basically traded working for someone else and having a life after work, to working for yourself and giving up all life other than work. This strains your relationships, puts your dreams on hold, and will burn you out.
More importantly, working in your business keeps your business from growing. It keeps your business from becoming a self-managing company. And it makes you wonder if this was all worth it or not.
“Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is the definition of insanity” ( Einstein)
Something has to change if you ever want to have any time freedom.
I decided on a combination of passive and not passive income streams over 5 decades ago. What I worked for was freedom. Time freedom. Lifestyle freedom.
Certainly that does not mean sitting on my coach watching TV or laying around being lazy. I gave birth to 6 children and inherited 3 more - there was no lazy time for me.
However, I vowed from the day I found out I was pregnant with my first child, my children would never see the inside of a daycare. Any business I started must be inclusive with my family.
And I kept that promise.
There were many lessons I had to learn early on in my entrepreneurial journey in order to achieve my time freedom goals.
You must learn to shift from working in your business to-
Working On Your Business(es)
What does working On your business mean?
Working on your business means stepping back from day-to-day operations to make sure your business is headed in the right direction.
If you are a micro-manager, your business is not going to scale.
I learned about working on your business during one of the phases when I was a teen; where I was held against my will and forced into human trafficking.
I took something completely evil and horrific, rights violating and despicable… and learned lessons. One of those lessons was how to delegate, or outsource.
These evil human beings were working on their illegal business and not in it.
After the escape, I became a model. While being a model, I learned about delegation and outsourcing.
I knew how to work ON my business and not IN my business. I had a manager who handled all my auditions, he also was in charge of finding work for me.
There was always a make-up artist on the set to do my make-up. There was a costume director who chose my outfits for me.
Working ON my modeling business was my part. I made sure to stay skinny and not gain any weight, I made sure I took care of my skin so I would never get a pimple, I was in charge of my attitude, practicing my poses and smile, etc.
I learned all this before I was 17 years old.
Fast forward through my life and the many businesses I have owned, the one main reason I could be mostly successful besides my marketing skills was my mastering the art of delegation.
I have been a real estate agent for over four decades. During those 40 + years, I also owned other business ventures.
Working on your business requires you to let go of about 80% of the tasks you are currently doing. Get those delegated. In today’s world with the internet, this is so easy to do. You can hire virtual assistants and virtual specialists to work in your business while you work on your business.
Since one of my income streams is owning a virtual assistant company, we can help you outsource all the tasks on your checklist so that you can work on your business.
What are the tasks in that 20% left that are about working on your business?
- Focusing on growing your revenue and watching your KPIs
- Working directly with your sellers
- Going on listing appointments
- Networking in your community
- Focusing on your personal development and leadership skills
- Focusing on growing your vision and business strategy
- Networking with prospects, peers, and connectors
- Building strategic alliances and other partnerships
- Reading!
- Studying your craft to stay ahead of your competition
- Doing your market research and analysis
- Talent acquisition
- Ideation: new products and services
- Expanding your vision and mission
- Sleep and rest, relaxation and meditation
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Turning off to gain new perspective and ideas for growth
There are more you can add to this list. Many of them are determined by the space you are in.
Prioritize Growing Yourself and Your Business
It is not easy to stop picking about every little thing someone does that is not perfect.
It is not easy to stop micro-managing when you are a perfectionist.
But you will never achieve your goal of why you started your business:
That of time freedom, financial and lifestyle freedom if you don’t spend 80% of your time working ON your business and shift into working only 20% of your time IN your business.
Let me know your struggles and thoughts. I would love to write more about this topic to help you gain your freedom.
I will be helping you on the ActiveRain Zoom call on Tuesday September 12, 2023 to learn how to outsource.
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