One of my former SCORE colleagues, Tuck Aikin, wrote the following article several decades ago about the unavoidable truth of business ownership is that it takes a personal transformation to be successful. Some of the data contained in the original article have become stale with time, but the message remains as true today as it was when Tuck penned it. To ensure the message continues to resonate with readers today, I took the liberty to update some of his original facts but kept the intended message intact.
There’s an interesting thing that virtually always happens as a startup business grows into a real business or at least a business that meets the income needs of its founder. The owner becomes exhausted, demoralized, dispirited, and disillusioned. “I don’t know what happened,” the owner muses, “I started out with such enthusiasm and excitement. Anything was possible, I was going to be my own boss, set my own hours, earn a better living, but now I just hate going in to work.”
This natural evolutionary stage with business ownership is a critical one – it’s the point at which the entrepreneur comes “…face to face with the unavoidable truth…” as Michael Gerber says in his book The E Myth Revisited: “I don’t own a business, I own a job…and it’s the worst job in the world! I can’t close my business when I want to because if it’s closed, I don’t get paid. I can’t leave it when I want to because when I leave, there’s nobody there to do the work. I can’t sell it because who wants to buy a job?”
This is the result of the tyranny of routine, the day-to-day grind of what feels like purposeless activity. Why did this happen, and what can be done to work through the seemingly impenetrable jungle of tasks and demands to get to the place where the business can stand on its own feet, whether you are there or not?
Why this happens is actually pretty simple: when entrepreneurs start out, they know how to do the work but have no idea of what it takes to run a business that does the work and almost certainly possess none of the skills or knowledge required to operate a business, even if it has only one employee, the owner! Learning that if it is to be done, we have to do it, or at least hire someone else to do it. That’s when we become an employer, and then a whole new set of knowledge and skills, and money, have to be introduced.
This special business ownership realization stage is a very difficult one and forces the owner to make a decision:
Go out of business, the “choice” of over 800,000 firms a year in the U.S.,
Tough it out and take on even more work and personal and financial risk, or
Try to “get small,” go back to the basics, to the simplicities of just doing a job.
Usually, those who try to implement this third-choice wind up eventually with the first group – they go out of business. The reason is that at the outset, the entrepreneur hated the routine of their regular job, which is why they started their own business in the first place. Now they find themselves mired in the routine again, but this time they have emotional, financial, and psychological investments in their effort and have no place to turn to “cash out.” “In short,” author Gerber says, “‘get small’ businesses literally implode on themselves.” The sense of helplessness and despair about business ownership exacts a huge emotional toll. Self-esteem usually plummets from which it may take years to recover.
Those who are eventually successful with their business startups seem to have a special way of getting through this crisis stage. How do they do it? Most certainly courage and determination are essential, but there’s something else that’s required, and it’s something that everyone who wants to own and operate their own business should consider before they ever consider business ownership.
At the outset the would-be entrepreneur must possess an affinity, a willingness, perhaps a passion, for personal transformation. They must have a strong desire for personal growth and enjoy the personal challenges involved in “…accessing new skills, new understanding, new knowledge, new emotional depth, new wisdom”, according to Gerber.
Not long ago we counseled a couple of apparently successful business partners. In only a short time their venture had grown to over $3 million a year in revenues, they had several employees and were appropriately profitable, but they were exhausted and hated the business. They wanted out – could we help them prepare their business for sale? Unfortunately, their service business relied so heavily on their personal involvement that without them, the business was practically valueless.
On further investigation we learned that both partners were strongly control-oriented and just couldn’t bring themselves to delegate, in a sense, to let go. No one could do the work as well as they could, so they did it. No personal transformation had taken place – they steadfastly refused to learn new management approaches or new behaviors. Unfortunately, we could only wish them good luck.
So, the lesson is, if you are a person who doesn’t like change, who avoids getting out of your Comfort Zone, who becomes anxious with the unfamiliar, find another outlet for your creative impulses. Business ownership is not for you. Take up the arts, travel, volunteer with an organization that supports your special interests such as nature, sports, photography, education, and yes, even politics. You can always back out of these endeavors without much damage, but that’s not so with business ownership. As so many entrepreneurs say, “the business owns you, you don’t own it.” It forces you to transform and grow. If you don’t, the business goes down and takes along with it your money, your emotional capital, your self-esteem, and often your personal relationships.
