Remember: Your Business Should Run Without You

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 10:20 AM PDT

Suppose you start a web design business. You are the only full time employee, though you hire freelance designers occasionally to help you out with larger projects. Over time the number of clients increases, and so do the revenues. Life is good.

Then one day unexpectedly a family emergency happens and you discover that you’ll be unable to work for three or four months. What happens to your business? You guessed, it will go down the drain since you won’t be there to work on it anymore.

In reality this will happened because you didn’t have a business in the first place.

From Wikipedia: A business (also known as enterprise or firm) is an organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers. Notice the “organization”. In other words, a business is a structure that stands on its own. If the whole structure depends on yourself and on your work then it’s not a business but rather a job you got for yourself where you are your own boss.

There’s a quick reality check you can make to see if you have a business: would another person or company possibly be interested in purchasing your business, and by doing so be able to run it without you afterward? If the answer is yes then you have a business, else you don’t.

There’s a very good book called the E-Myth that talks about this point. Here’s a quote from chapter 9:

Your business and your life are totally separate things.

At its best, your business something apart from you, rather than a part of you, with its own rules and its own purposes. An organism, you might say, that will live or die according to how well it performs its sole function: to find and keep customers.

Once you recognize that the purpose of your life is not to serve your business, but that the primary purpose of your business is to serve your life, you can then go to work on your business, rather than in it, with a full understanding of why it is absolutely necessary for you to do so.

Bottom line: if your business still relies heavily on your person than it’s time to start thinking and changing things around. You want to build something that stands on its own, cause that is a real business and something much more valuable to own.