So, you want to build your business from scratch, replace your full-time income, walk away from your job, say “Sayonara” to the boss, and take off to go run your own business. Do your own thing and live your own life. Right?
The cool thing, as someone who fulfilled that dream back in 2014 in four and a half short months, is to watch how many others pine & dream for the same goal.
As a piece of advice to other business owners and future business owners: it’s awesome! Always has been, always will be. 100% worth the stress and work.
But one thing I've learned again and again throughout many conversations with other future business owners: There’s a problem with making that happen. Everyone wants to have that autonomy, and the ability to work from home. Everyone dreams of the ability to do whatever they want whenever they want. But when we started to look at why so few people are able to pull it off successfully (and the definition of successful here is that they both walked away, and didn’t have to go back shortly there-after). From my personal perspective, there’s a huge piece of the puzzle missing for many of them, and that’s what I want to address now!
One of the first pieces is that these guys are, more times than not, interested in doing this but they're not committed. They're interested in walking away from their full time job, but they're not committed to making it happen. Everyone thinks it’ll be cool, fun, and that hearing a story like mine (Started the business in May and by the end of August, was making more money part time than full time) makes it sound so simple. It’s easy to get motivated when you hear a story like mine. But I’ve talked to person after person who has a part time business that is floundering and struggling. They are often making, maybe, $500 a month on the side. They know there’s potential, but they don’t know why it’s not working
There’s three key steps to fixing the most common problem holding back these wan-trepreneurs.
Before I proceed though, caveat emptor: You have to truly want this.
I mean truly want this. You have to sit down and decide if you are willing to make the sacrifices to make this happen. That may mean saying no to events with friends for a while, it may mean missing something that seems incredible so that you can reach that goal you want. You have to be committed – either you are going for that goal 100%, or you’re not going to do it at all.
Because without conviction, it won’t happen. Trust me.
First off!
The first step is get crystal clarity on is your goals.
I can hear the eyes rolling from here.
The first time I spoke with my coach, I did the same thing when he gave me the same BS line. I was pretty clear on my goals: replace my full time income and stick-it to my boss!
I was talking to this coach about how I needed to get more sales and I had only sold two books my first month in business and that, obviously, wasn’t going to cut it. I knew I needed help growing the business, because I was starting to stress! And our entire first session, all this guy did was sit down and walk through my goals.
For an hour.
Poking and prodding at my goals, asking why I wanted them, how I decided that that goal was important. On and on and on.
At the end of the session I actually cut him off when he assigned me homework that was more goal setting BS and told him I wasn’t interested. That I wanted techniques and strategy for how to accelerate my business growth and I didn’t need to spend time putting all my goals on a stupid dream board.
And he said something that has stuck with me: “The how is not hard. Someone out there has done this before or something similar enough that figuring out how to accomplish the goal is not going to be difficult. What is hard for most people is getting clear on what they want to accomplish and why. They have some nebulous idea in their head, or they have picked up dreams and goals from friends and family members. It doesn’t matter to them, and there’s very little clarity about what goal is trying to be achieved. We take on goals because society tells us we should want to take our kids to Disneyworld or dr