Is passion for your craft enough to sustain and grow your business effectively? You’ve probably heard the saying “Do what you love and the money will come” or this one “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”
Those are nice little sayings but can we get in touch with reality for a moment? Too many people actually take these sayings literally and much to their dismay when they discover business IS actually work.(this could have a bearing on the 97% fail rate)
You can be great at something and love to do it and that is fantastic. That is what it takes to even have the desire to start a business. The tricky part is to find out if that’s enough to make you push through all the day to day minutia required to run a business? A new business has to be built. Even if you have all the money you need you still need to build it and make it work. Do you really think this is a 9 to 5 Monday thru Friday endeavor? When you start tracking and paying: taxes, payroll, insurance, loans, fuel and leases not to mention employees, you’ll see that passion can start to take a back seat just to get through the week.
In the beginning you may very well be wearing all the hats. But I can assure you, if you don’t have a plan to turn those responsibilities over to someone else, you’re headed for misery and quite possibly utter failure. You need to plan for those roles to be undertaken by employees or outsourced for you. The sooner you can do that the quicker you’re going to be able to work on your passion and not the mundane at least for a little while.
When you get those few things taken care of next you’ll find that you can’t produce enough on your own to meet demand. Now you hire help and train them to do what you do and things get easier. Then you realize that you have more employees and you have to raise your prices to cover it. That then leads to you having to go out and drum up more work, in other words, you have to sell your product. Since sales was never your real skill and you need higher volume you start to struggle getting orders. Things are now hit and miss back at the shop and your employees are starting to look for new jobs and you start thinking “It’s all crashing down.”
How’s your passion doing right now at this point?
You also have payments due for your line of credit you used for materials and making payroll a few times, 3 years left on a 5 year lease for your building and two truck payments. This on top of your payroll and taxes. Feeling better yet?
Of course there’s always those bad decisions you made with the self proclaimed marketing gurus. You know the ones that told you they could have business banging down your door if you paid them $2,000 a month for 6 months. Those incredible social media campaigns and email marketing that have produced absolutely zero after 3 months. They just tell you “It’s a marathon not a sprint you have to be patient.” Yeah, be patient while they extract the next 6k from you.
Now how’s your passion?
It’s starting to feel like a real downer isn’t it. If you haven’t started a business yet you may be feeling a little discouraged after reading that. Well don’t be. Believe it or not none of that will end your business if you don’t let it. Hopefully you don’t get into that situation in the first place. But I guarantee you, you’ll experience some part of it. That’s the nature of the beast. That’s why everyone isn’t starting and running a business. That’s why the failure rate is over 90%.
Regarding your passion. If it’s truly a passion you will find the way to make it work. One of the best ways is to understand all of this going in. Understand that you most likely will not get to “sit at the potters’ wheel and make clay pots all day.” You now have a business to run and it’s going to take everything. Done right though you can build a business and a future that can be incredibly rewarding AND still enjoy your passion.
Now that you know what you may be running into, let's jump back a little and review how you can avoid the big passion killers and create some freedom in and from your business.
Step one: delegate tasks to experts and create systems and processes to run the day to day operations minimizing your involvement.
Step two: Train others to do what you do and let them be great at it.
Step three: Learn to be a sales professional or hire some to move your product into the marketplace.
Step four: Minimize your debt. Keep your debt to income ratio low. If you can operate debt free, do it. It may be a struggle but the payoff is massive in more ways than just financial.
I always look for “Done for you” systems that can propel and automate portions of my business that will then free me up to do what I’m passionate about and you should too.
It doesn’t mean you turn the keys over to somebody because you always need to keep an eye on your business or you’ll soon find someone else owning it!
Hold onto the passion that got you started and continue to look for solutions that don’t require your undivided attention and you’ll not only see your business grow but you’ll enjoy your passion even more. Seek advice and don’t be afraid to accept help and quality coaching to make you and your business better. In today's information age there’s no excuse for not finding exactly what you need to make your business run so it benefits you and your passion.
