Work on your Business, not in it – Avoiding being owned by your business

Lessons on systems

Last week a friend of mine recommended the book “The E-myth revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It” by Michael Gerber and I give it my full recommendation.
While I am not through with all of it yet, there is one major flaw pointed out by Gerber that I have seen again and again why small businesses struggle: the lack of a system. What do you do if you acquire a new lead? What are your next steps? Do you know what your service is and where your customer is in your process map? Do you have it written down?

If all of this is in your head, you don´t own a business, because the business owns you. It only works as long as you work (please read that twice).

The last weeks lessons helped to paint a clearer picture of what my business does. Taking this information and creating a workflow map has taken up quite some of my time lately but I already find it to be very helpful. As I want to be able to outsource some of my tasks to have more time to work on my business (and not in it) or taking a vacation, I found enough motivation why this is useful to me. As a side effect it also put one of my not yet launched business ideas into focus so I ended up having a déjà vu while practicing Dee’s advanced SWOT technique on this product. Had I known this method earlier, I would have had written my business plan a lot faster.

The 3 second pitch

Finally there was the video launched that I was waiting for the most in the “Your Business Module“: The 3 second pitch. As you might have realized, I find it mandatory to have a high level of precision if you describe anything of importance for yourself.

So I now have had the change to develop a three-second pitch for both a web-application and a consultant. Guess what? I found the product to be much easier than the consultant part. While the product is targeted to being a solution for one single problem of a customer, my consulting services requires some deeper thinking and I am not yet satisfied with my pitch right now. The description is still to broad and not focused on what I can do best and what I really want to do. So there still lies some work ahead of me.

It is most interesting how the techniques taught so far and the topics covered fit together so well. While other courses throw tons of puzzle pieces in front of you and you still have to figure out which way to turn it, the Online Marketing MBA places the pieces neatly in front of you. You just have to connect them yourself.

Chris

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