One of the best analogies I’ve once heard about a business was that your business SHOULD be like a child. When you start out, it is a helpless creature. It can’t live without you. It NEEDS you to grow. You need to nurture and care for your business when it’s young. However, as time goes on, your child, as should your business, it will grow and eventually it can take care of itself until it reaches the point that it will live it’s life without you. HOWEVER, most people tend to treat their business like a pet. A pet, especially when it’s young does need your help and more than likely, cannot live without you. The big difference is that even as that pet grows, it will ALWAYS NEED YOU AND WILL NEVER STOP NEEDING YOU. So businesses like that will continuously have to feed, cared for and be nurtured, FOREVER. So if you’re thinking about starting your business or if you already have an existing “pet”, the question is how can you move your business to become less reliant upon you in order to grow?

1. Decide how you can remove yourself from your business. If you’re in an existing business that requires your presence in order to function, think about what it would take. If you ran a sandwich shop, can you train others to perform your function while you open a second location? Can you hire competent management that will at least do as good a job as you, and maybe (*gasp*), do a better job than you?
2. Shore up secondary revenue streams. Do you do something profoundly unique or exceptional? Would others benefit from this knowledge? If you were a plumber and you perfected a method to reduce your time on a job by 50%, do you think other plumbers would want to know about it? Could you write a book? How about teaching a classroom of eager students? What about developing a product to simplify the work done in your profession? If you have something people want or need, you’re on the right track. By creating a revenue source from something other than your focused effort, you have developed the first step towards income diversity.
3. How can you grow your business beyond you? Entrepreneurs have a tendency to possess the “I can do it all myself” complex. A “child-focused” business needs to be able to AT LEAST maintain it’s current level of success without you. If you are essential to the everyday operation of the business, you’re going down the wrong path. From time to time ask yourself, “Is my activity creating more of a need for me or am I doing something to remove me from the day-to-day operations?” Yes, I know you’re the cornerstone of your business, without you it would crumble. I hate to tell you, that is a great way to own a job for the rest of your life. Can you expand your business into other arenas? What can you do to make the business bigger than is is today? One thing I highly recommend is finding or creating a mastermind group or a “board of directors”. These are groups that are made up of skilled and smart business owners that come together and develop an accountability for each other. They help benchmark what you’re doing, make suggestions on how to grow your business and even to stop some activity you might be doing. These groups are hard to create, but if you do, you can gain huge insight as to how others are doing it, and your help may also grow another person’s business as well.

In my opinion, the biggest businesses become huge because the leaders aren’t working on everything. Do you think the captain of a cruise ship cares what brand of paper towels are in the bathrooms? Think big and grow big. Do it with your guidance, not your meddling.

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