Bettering Your Business Owning Self

When you first decide that you want to own your own business, you do it with passion, gusto and a touch of naivety. No budding entrepreneur goes into owning a new business with anything but stars in their eyes and tunnel vision for success. This is something that works for some business owners. For others, it’s their downfall. A good business owner always sees both the positives and the negatives of their business dream, knowing when they should make their moves and how they should play the long game. The thing is, once you get to the finish line, you notice that the finish line isn’t real. This is because in business, unless you close your business down, there is no finish line. There is just you and whether you think you have what it takes to keep pushing your business further than you’ve ever taken it, growing it bigger and bigger until you want to sell on.
As a business owner, you are going to be used to certain challenges thrown your way from suppliers, competitors, staff and even the customers buying from you. The biggest challenges, however, are going to come from yourself. When you’ve been playing the business game for some time, updating your education and online marketing training as practices evolve and attending endless meetings, you can lose a little of that initial drive and passion that fired you into success. At some point in your business career, money doesn’t matter as much and the role of being an owner in a business means nothing more than a title. It’s natural; as life and business progresses, so do you. The problem lies in the motivation – it disappears once you don’t feel like you’ve anything left to fight for; when you feel ‘finished’. Trying to challenge yourself on a daily basis isn’t easy, especially when you’ve ticked the boxes that you wanted to tick. So, how can you keep that motivation going? How do you, as a now seasoned entrepreneur, keep that newbie spark going? Well, the answer here is that your motivation is directly related to how you feel challenged as a businessperson. If you don’t feel challenged, you have nothing to fire you up to chase the answer. The following suggestions can be extremely helpful for business owners looking to challenge themselves and find some joy in the chase again.
Teach.
You’ve spent years making mistake after mistake in your quest for business greatness. You’ve seen the highs of winning and the lows of losing, and once you gain the success that you’ve always craved, teaching it to others can be a natural progression. This step, this huge leap, is going to change the way that you do business. As you impart your wisdom to the new entrepreneurs in your industry and in others, you can make personal changes and talk about how you would do things differently. This is especially important if you started your business thirty years ago, way before the digital age of social media and round the clock consumerism. The challenge of teaching others can keep you motivated, hungry for others to have the same success that you’ve had.
Write.
Many business owners that have reached their own personal ceiling for success often need another avenue for their creativity. For you, this could be writing. Whether you are writing articles for business publications, or you have the knowledge and the patience to pen an entire book, you need to get all your thoughts out onto paper and make it happen at your own pace. Sometimes writing isn’t a natural avenue – the thoughts and ideas may be there, but the words won’t come. The answer is to get some help from a ghost writer or an editor who may be able to help you instead. The more you write about your business and how you made your fortune, the more people will recognise your name and know who you are.
Goals.
You may feel like you’ve reached your goals, but is this because you’ve hit your initial goals that you wanted to when you first started in business, or because you haven’t thought about what more you could do with it? The question isn’t whether you’ve hit the goals, but whether there is more out there and your goals are just too shallow right now. You could stay motivated by setting better goals; goals that are higher than you imagined and feel out of reach. It gives you something to work toward, to hone in on and to help to you to expect more from yourself.
Mentor.
Similar to teaching, you could choose to hire a direct apprentice to learn from you. You could impart your wisdom and your ideas into them in a way that you can’t with a broad class to teach, and you could invest in a younger employee who hasn’t had the chance to be invested in before by anyone. It’s not up to you to hand-hold someone, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t spend some time teaching them everything that you know, while elevating them and their own personal goals. When you become a symbol for success, others out there want to be like you, doing exactly what you do and making a name for themselves because of you. Take the time to mentor someone one on one and you’ll be able to retire knowing that you changed someone’s life for the better.
It’s a big commitment, to be challenged, and you have to want to make this commitment not only for the people who work in your organisation, but for yourself. Life doesn’t just stop because you found success, because there are always other ways to find it again and again. The difference will be how much you want to find success and whether you are willing to go the distance for it. Take the time to think about what your next move will be, and you’ll be toasting champagne to making it count.