You Don’t Really Have a Business Unless…

So I just got off a coaching call with a client. He’s doing low six figures and in a very, very hyper niche industry, and he’s at this crossroads. And I think it’s a crossroads that a lot of you listening to this podcast maybe can commiserate with or will find yourself at some point down the road. See, for him, he is a very high paid consultant for effectively one large client. And the question that he has is, do I lean into this kind of high paid consultant work, try to bring in some more clients and keep growing that way? Or should I start looking at productizing my service or productionizing my service and then building a team around delivering it? And the crossroads that he’s at is fundamentally the difference between do I continue having a job or do I start building a business that is capable of growing even when I’m on vacation or when I’m not working, capable of being sold to somebody else, because it’s not dependent on me as the individual. And this is a hard question to answer because I think a lot of people, they get into entrepreneurship, into their very first business, or what they consider to be a business from an LLC or a partnership perspective. They’re the ones that are out there as self employing themselves and doing the job. And so that feels like you have a business when in reality you just have a job.

So in this case, you know, the guy, let’s say he’s an accountant, because that’s an easy one to understand. He left the big accounting firm and he went off and started his own practice, and now he’s doing accounting services for, you know, other people, but he doesn’t have any employees. And so it’s just him delivering that service, that product to them. If you really think about it, that’s not a business. That’s just a job where the boss is you, right? Like, you’re a crazy person. You’re working for a crazy person. So you have a job that you cannot leave because as soon as you stop working there, your boss is going to be upset at you, but, you know, he can’t do anything because you’re also him, right? So when you decide to go on vacation, your business just stops growing. And so I don’t like thinking of that as a business.
I like to think of it as like this third, this third entity that I don’t think anybody wants to stay in for too long. Your goal should not be to stay there, because the truth is you’re very fragile. You’re very fragile in that ecosystem, and it’s very easy to go become burnt out, as you’re always the one having to deal with client requests, always the ones delivering, always the one going out there and, like, churning up new deals and marketing. It’s just a very exhausting experience. And this is why I’m such a big proponent of building the team around yourself, building the product or service in a way that can be delivered by other people. And the fear that a lot of people have is they don’t know how to do that. They don’t know how to do that. Right.
In the example of our accountant, he knows how to do accounting. It’s very easy for him to stay in his lane and just keep doing accounting and then find clients as it’s needed. You don’t need very many because it’s just you. It’s very high margin. Right. So it’s very easy to stay in that lane, and that’s why a lot of people stay there. It’s like the fuzzy handcuffs that we talked about in other podcast episodes, where the fuzzy handcuffs are the handcuffs we choose to wear as we accept good in our life, rather than taking off the shackles and pursuing great, because pursuing great comes with risk. It requires us to grow and expand and take on new capacities that we don’t currently have.
We have to learn how to hire, how to retain talent, how to direct that talent. Right? Like, those are things that maybe our accountant friend doesn’t know how to do. So when he’s standing at that crossroad and he’s looking at the two paths, he’s like, well, I’m kind of leaning towards just continue doing what I’m doing, whereas I sit there at my vantage point. You know, I’m further down the road, a little bit higher up the mountain. I can turn around. I can see where those two paths lead. He can’t see that. I can see where they lead.

And I can tell you that one is a better destination than the other one. Now, one of those paths is going to be very difficult in the beginning. The other one is very difficult in the end. And the reason the path of difficulty in the beginning is the one that most entrepreneurs, I’ll use air quotes, avoid, is because it is hard in the beginning, and they can see all the difficulty. Whereas staying the course with your job, of your productized, individualized delivery, it gets hard in the end because you can never get away from it. And so it’s like the frog that’s boiling in the water. You don’t feel it until it’s too hot, and you’re already dead. So I’m just telling you this because it can feel so scary and daunting to go down the path away from the one that looks better and that feels familiar and that you’ve been doing right, but that is ultimately the one that will lead you towards building the life of your dream.