In my last blog, we talked about the difference between Lifestyle Businesses and Growth Businesses. To recap:
- A Lifestyle Business is like owning a job—often better paid and with more freedom than a regular job. Most small law firms, medical practices, and retail franchises fall into this category. The trade-off? You carry the financial risk that your employer would otherwise bear.
- A Growth Business, on the other hand, fills an expanding market in an efficient and scalable way.
If you want to own a Growth Business, you need to:
- Spot or navigate to an expanding market.
- Build an efficient, scalable business model.
Sounds exciting, right? Here’s the catch: growth is painful.
Why Growth is Always Painful
Both spotting opportunities and building a scalable business require creating something entirely new—amid uncertainty and inevitable setbacks.
You’ll have to do things you’ve never done before, things you’re probably not great at. To improve, you’ll need to learn—and learning means failing.
The more you fail, the more you learn. But failure is painful. Often, it’s also expensive.
The Challenge of Hiring Help
“What if I hire competent people to handle the things I don’t know?”
It’s a valid question, but here’s the reality:
- You might hire the wrong people.
- You might hire the right people but give them the wrong instructions.
- Even if you hire the right people and give them the right instructions, building the machine might take longer than expected, and you could run out of money.
Pain, pain, pain.
And if, by some miracle, you avoid all these pitfalls, you may still lack the skills to maintain your “machine” or step in if your contractors walk out the door. (Cue the excruciating pain.)
Entrepreneurship: Equal Parts Exhilaration and Terror
Here’s the unvarnished truth: entrepreneurship is a process of discovery. It’s exhilarating and terrifying, much like raising kids.
Your family photos capture smiles, but they don’t show the inevitable sicknesses, bullying, and disappointments along the way. Similarly, building a Growth Business comes with both triumphs and setbacks.
Am I trying to discourage you from pursuing a Growth Business?
Not at all. Quite the opposite—I’m daring you to embrace the unavoidable failures and pain.
If building a successful business were easy, it wouldn’t be any fun. Without uncertainty and creativity, you could just hand it to an AI and go back to binge-watching Netflix.
The Quest to Build a Growth Business
Building a Growth Business is an adventure—a quest. To clarify your direction and create a strategic path, tools like the Vision & Strategy Map™ can help you map out your values, goals, and strategic focus areas effectively. The cool part? Unlike our ancestors, who risked life and limb for their quests, you only risk money and time.
Even if you lose both, you’ll still walk away with a richer, more illuminating experience.
That said, there’s a smarter way to pursue this adventure. You can:
- Save money by investing more time.
- Save time by investing more money.
- Or, invest in a business coach, who can save you both time and money by guiding you around pitfalls and helping you chart a more efficient path to your goals.
To stay focused and align your journey with a clear vision, consider leveraging your Summit Vision™, a tool designed to keep your long-term objectives in sight while navigating the daily challenges of growth.
Building your Growth Business will still involve pain, but a coach can help you prepare for it and manage it.
Conclusion
Are you ready to embrace the pain and joy of growing your business? Let’s talk. A smart strategy and the right support can make all the difference.
