I believe the first thing business owners need to understand is the difference between training and education. Training is utilized when you are trying to increase the uniformity, efficiency and repeatable quality of your product or service. Education is utilized to increase the autonomy of your employees to reduce the need for heavy handed management, nimble response, and increased customer/client satisfaction.
When you think of your business life, do you feel like you are on a steel bridge or a swinging one? Or somewhere in between? If you don’t feel completely confident in your business structure you are doing yourself and your business a disservice. When you have to hyperfocus on where your metaphorical hands & feet are or which way the wind might blow you are using all of your big beautiful brain power to not die (again, metaphorically). And that’s no way for a business owner to operate.
It’s a scary time. The novel coronavirus. Government ordered shut down of schools and businesses. Massive unemployment. Social unrest. Remote everything. Change is in the air. It’s not the kind of change that is happening to someone else, it is personal, shifting your daily life in numerous ways. Change creates uncertainty. It can feel like the ground beneath your feet is moving. Where to you go to find certainty? Stability? Peace? Inside.
It is tempting to bow to the mind chatter that fills my head as soon as I awake. To make my first task, my to do list. But I did not go into business to be a slave to it. I started my business to serve my passion for helping business owners, while at the same time giving myself the gift of creating the life of my dreams. Dreams of joy and morning strolls.
Simply put, an engine is a machine for converting energy (fuel) into motion. And an engineer is a person who designs, operates and oversees an engine. Most business owners start out expect to be all three: fuel, engine & engineer for their startup. We bootstrap, use sweat equity, and “build the plane as we fly it” all in the hopes that little by little we find other sources of fuel to create motion within our business and build a sturdy engine to generate the profit & lifestyle we envision. We start generating cash, hiring a team, sourcing vendors, creating structure, investing in capital, etc.
