This is often really hard for business owners to do. There are several reasons why, the first being time. How many owners take time out of their business to work on their business? It is really hard to see things for what they are when you are in the thick of it every day. You often only have a few minutes to put out whatever fire is burning the biggest at the moment and often times don’t take time to look back and learn from mistakes or much less, plan for success. One of my favorite sayings is “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance” not quite sure who said it, but I agree with it so we will go with it. The second reason I believe that business owners don’t really take a good hard look at their business is they are afraid of what they will see. My husband co-owner and I are guilty of both of these things. By not taking the time and being afraid of what we would see, our business quickly got out of hand, and not in a good way.
We were spending so much time on clients that didn’t appreciate everything we did for them and we weren’t making any money doing it. We weren’t doing what we really loved any more, just doing what the clients asked because we felt like we couldn’t tell them “no”. We also didn’t take time to really evaluate our business and the direction it was going to see if that was the right way to go. We were just trying to keep up. We found that when our passion for what we love got lost so did the quality of our work and our passion for our clients. Sometimes it takes something else in your life to make you re-evaluate everything. Ours was the birth of our son,
Carter on January 17th of this year. He is nothing short of amazing and he really made us think, we don’t want to miss even one minute of this awesome thing we created and we have a workload from hell right now, so what do we do? We started looking at every aspect of our business with a microscope. Expenses, overhead, packages, partners, clients, you name it and we looked at it. It was frightening!!
We found that we didn’t spend enough time doing what we preach which was take time out of your business to work on your business, so we made a commitment to practice what we preach. (I have a feeling that will come in handy with this whole parenting thing) We also found that we didn’t love what we were doing so we changed what we did. We may lose some clients but we are now attracting the right kind of clients. We looked at our products that we offered and if they weren’t fun and innovative, we removed it. We also thought of some new and innovative ideas for our clients because they are with us because of our innovation and creativity so we better be innovative and creative dangit! After taking the time and committing to a new process we have found a new passion and love for our business that hasn’t been there in a long time. This passion has re-ignited things we let fall by the wayside and things that needed to change drastically.
So my question is this~ when was the last time you took a long hard look at your business? Do you like what you see? If not what is your plan to change it? Don’t make decisions for your business based out of fear that only leads to misery. Make the decision based on the passion you once had and the entrepreneurial spirit you have inside. It is still there; you just have to take the time and not be afraid to look for it again. When you find it don’t let it go ever again!
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