Is Your Business A Hamster Wheel?

To the casual observer there is something amusing about the mouse that runs endlessly in a spinning wheel. It’s absurd to us that any creature would waste so much of its time and energy doing something that has no purpose. No matter how fast the mouse runs he never gets anywhere, the wheel just keeps turning forever. It is obvious to us that the mouse’s efforts are futile because we are standing outside the cage and can see the whole picture.

Yet thousands of Australian business owners are in the exact same position as that mouse. They work 12-14hr days in their businesses, sometimes 7 days a week. But it doesn’t matter how much work they do there is always the same amount to do the next day. It never gets any easier, the work never slows down and they can’t see an end in sight. That’s the position Jennifer was in when she came to Instant Business Success for business coaching.

Jennifer is the owner of a flower shop. She started the business to get more control over her destiny and to build something lasting that would support her for the rest of her life. In the beginning she was excited about the future and enthusiastic. She didn’t mind the long hard days because she was sacrificing some of her leisure for the big payoff that being in business brings. She knew that it required a lot of hard work to get a new business off the ground but once it was up and running she could cut back on her hours a little.

What Jennifer didn’t foresee was that the hours never got any shorter. Months and years went by and she was still working long hard days just to get everything done. The busier her business got the more hours she had to work. She didn’t have the time to hire and train staff who could help her with the work load and she couldn’t afford to hire experienced people.

After 2 years she was no longer willing to be trapped in a business that demanded so much of her time. Jennifer engaged a business coach from Instant Business Success to try and find a way to make her business work better and take up less of her time.

Jennifer had two choices. Her situation could be changed in an instant if she wanted to pack up shop and go back to working for someone else. Immediately she would have her weekends and evenings back.

Or if she was really committed, she could begin the process of making her business independent. It would require her to devote some time everyday towards strategically building her business systems as well as all the other work she had to do. But the payoff would come when she could hire someone else to do part of the work and free up her own time.

As tired as Jennifer was she wasn’t ready to give up just yet. She had built a successful floristry business, she didn’t want to give it all away, she wanted to make it work better.

In the beginning Jennifer could allocate only 30 minutes each day towards creating her business systems. Two months later she hired her first employee and was immediately rewarded with an extra 3hrs every day to herself. She invested that extra time in creating more systems for her business.

12 months later Jennifer took her first holiday in 3 years. It wasn’t easy for her to walk away from a business that couldn’t run without her for so long. She couldn’t resist calling the shop everyday to check that everything was OK. But she got a holiday and a business that could at last run profitably without her working in it. At last Jennifer was doing the job she should have been doing from the start, she was managing her business rather than working in it.

Jennifer now has just set up a second shop. Except this time she won't be working in it, she’ll be duplicating the systems she has already created and hiring other people to run it for her.

For more information on how you can get more time for yourself and your family by building a profitable business working without you, call your Instant Business Success Coach today on (02) 9411 1345 or email info@instantbusinesssuccess.com