Business Freedom! It’s all about choice – and the choices you make about how much time you are required to work in your business.
With Business Freedom, it becomes your choice whether you work in your business or not, and how much you work in it. It is also your choice what you do with your business – whether you keep it, close it, expand it, reduce it or sell it.
In simple terms, in order for you to have more business freedom, your business needs to be
It may or may not surprise you to learn that many – if not most – businesses do not meet ALL of these criteria.
Why not?
Well, it's not necessarily because they are bad businesses. And it's not usually because the owners of the businesses are bad business people.
From my experience, it is because the businesses have not been developed or structured to meet these criteria. But sometimes "Business Blindness" gets in the way.
Starting, owning and running a business takes passion and commitment and persistence. And courage. Guts.
Often in the middle of the passion, the commitment and the persistence, we business owners become blind to what is actually happening in the business. We become blind to what we need to do to improve, change or re-structure the business to give us what we want. It's Business Blindness!
The business needs to give us more of what we want – and less of what we don't want. But in the heat of business battles, when the very survival of the business can be on the line, we sometimes forget what we really wanted when we started the business. We get caught up in "the business" – and often keep going doing stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense – in the name of persistence, commitment and passion. That takes courage – but it's just dumb.
Business Blindness is Dumb.
Blind passion is dumb. Blind commitment is dumb. Blind persistence is dumb. And having the courage to continue to do dumb things – is just dumb.
Staying on the business owner's treadmill with no business freedom is just dumb too.
But, Business Blindness is voluntary. It's our choice. Or generally, more correctly, it's when we abandon our right and responsibility to make uncomfortable choices. Sticking our head in the sand of our own business also leads to blindness…
We don't have to be blind in our own business, but we do need to remember to open our eyes. And we do need to make better choices – and take responsibility for our choices.
It's time to open our eyes and re-look at our own business. We need to take more time out of working IN the business and start working more cleverly ON the business.
Most business owners don't make enough time to work ON their business. Generally, it's not because they don't want to, but because they get so caught up in the "doing" of their business that they have no time or energy left to figure out what needs to be done to extract themselves from their own business.
But that is just continuing the Business Blindness – and continuing life on the treadmill!
One definition of insanity is "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result". To get Business Freedom, you don't want to be doing the same things over and over again – if they are not working for you. You will need to be doing things differently. And you'll probably need to be doing different things.
It's important to realize you can change. Things can change. You can change the things you do.
Some Big Questions for you…
The 6 Essentials And 39 Principles of Business Freedom
This outlines his 6 Essentials and 39 Principles of Business Freedom. These form the framework for the Business Freedom philosophies covered in MyBusinessFreedom. With these principles successfully implemented in your business, you can achieve whatever business freedom means to you. Without them, you may stay trapped on the business treadmill
Business Freedom Makes Your Business More Valuable
Removing yourself from your business will give you your business freedom and build the value of your business.
The Heartbreaking Exit Strategy for Business
When is the right time to start planning your exit from your business? "Begin with the end in mind," writes Stephen Covey in his book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". How many business owners have actually done that, anyway? Let's take a look at some statistics I came across with last year.
