Work On Your Business Not In It

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard about running a small home business, which I suppose, applies to any small business, is to work on your business not in it. I can’t remember where I read that advice but I can identify with it totally. It’s so easy to let your business dominate your life. It can become all consuming if you don’t take control of it. It’s important to keep everything in perspective.

I’ve met plenty of people in my working life whose whole identity is tied in with the job they do. They exist for work and the job they do defines their life. Their self-esteem is dependent on their position, the higher they get the greater they feel. They have lost perspective. If they are made redundant, they are stranded, left without meaning, with no depth to their character to pull them through.

Running a small business involves you doing everything from ordering, pricing, marketing not to mention the technical aspects of running a small business on a day-to-day basis. With such involvement, it’s easy to submerge yourself into the business and forget about everything else. When you feel this happening, take a step back and just press the pause button.

You are not your business. You are the owner, the CEO. Step back from your business and look at it in a detached way not a personal way. Detachment will enable you to make rational and logical decisions rather than emotional ones. If you’ve invested time and money in a product or strategy and it isn’t working or selling, you need to take a detached view so you can make a logical decision about what action to take.

You can’t do this if your identity is wrapped up in the business. Your success depends on a large part in making good decisions, even if in making a decision to take some action is an admission that an earlier decision you made was wrong. You can only do this if you are detached from your business. If you work on your business and not in it. Detachment will give you perspective. When things go wrong you won’t feel so bad about it. You’ll see things more clearly and take decisions that are right for your business and not based on your ego.