Work On Your Business

If you want something done right, don’t do it yourself, delegate it yourself.

• anonymous

It’s time to start working on your business

On versus In

Working IN your business is anything that’s a job: execution, yes, but also the management of the execution.  Working IN your business refers to those day-to-day activities that could be easily entrusted to someone else.

Working ON your business, however, includes anything strategic: business strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategy, product development, research, and the vision and decisions that live in the C-suite.  As you start up or launch new products, it also includes creating the systems that make your business run.

Working on your business is the key to escaping the ultimately suffocating condition of doing everything yourself.  It is to create a company that doesn’t depend on you and consistently generates the results you want without you having to deliver them personally.

How to Work On Your Business

1. Hire the right employees – Hiring and training the right employees is daunting, but it is essential to universal growth. With proper training, an employee can oversee everyday tasks freeing up the owner to focus on growing their business and getting new clients.
2. Evaluate things you’re doing and make sure they actually matter. For example, we all have these assumed tasks – spend time on Twitter and email.  But do those things matter?
3. Intentionally choose three things to do a day and nothing more. This will force you to pick only the most essential things to do.
4. Try to work yourself out of a job by delegating, hiring, and using other services. Most of us start by doing 100% of the work ourselves.  Start trying to work yourself out of a job in specific roles like customer support, website design and development, writing, or any other role you could hire out.
5. Get clear about where you want to go with your business and whyyou want to go there.  And write down these goals.  For example, is it to make $xxxx per month?  Retire at xxx age?  Make a meaningful impact on xxxxx?

The words you write down matter because if that wise, sensitive part of you doesn’t buy it, you’ll be back IN the business again in the future.  So be clear about where you want to go and why.

The Bible

Of course, the Bible has a lot to say about working ON your business.

First is to acknowledge that you cannot do it all.  That would be working IN your business.  Leaders need humility to acknowledge they need help, to delegate, and to trust their employees.  None of these are easy.   Proverbs 16:18 says,

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.

Second, don’t be timid.  Growing companies need strong leadership.  How can you be humble and bold at the same time?  2 Timothy 1:7 says,

For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love, and self-discipline.

And Matthew 7:12 says,

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. 

God gave business leaders the skills necessary to build a business.  But those skills are to be also used to glorify God, and one way to glorify God is to efficiently and appropriately deploy those abilities.

Don’t let the minutia of routine tasks get in the way of using those abilities.  

Instead, learn to delegate, keep your eye on the big picture and let the Holy Spirit help discern what is essential and what is not.