I frequently encounter this odd, paradoxical statement in my work. My clients specifically hired me to teach them how to run their businesses in a way that will give them more time and freedom, yet when I try to schedule sessions with them, they often tell me they’re “too busy.” They’re so busy trying to do that they “don’t have time” to learn how to do those things better, faster, and with less effort.
I recently checked in on a new client a couple of weeks after their first session with me, and their Integrator was over the moon about how much they’d been accomplishing in their weekly meetings. He said, “We got 10 issues resolved today! Normally, we’d have been hung up and lucky to solve one, but every week, we’re solving things that have been hanging around for months or years, and worse still, the same problems kept recurring. But now we’ve solved them for good, and we can focus on what matters: making our customers happy and growing our business.”
Bald tires & blowouts: how you can unwittingly sabotage the traction you’ve worked so hard to achieve
Who hasn’t done this? You’re speaking with someone – perhaps a potential customer at a networking event – and they ask what you do. They are intrigued by your elevator pitch and follow up with, “So exactly how do you do that?”
The single most embarrassing lesson I’ve ever learned in my whole business life came when I found out my employees had nicknamed me “Hurricane Ken”.
It happens to all successful entrepreneurs: your business gets to be more than you can handle. When you first start a company, you have no alternative but to be involved in every aspect – planning, sales, operations, finance, personnel – because you’re working either alone or with a very small team of collaborators. You work hard, and the business grows to the point where being involved in everything is a job and a half. You are overworked, overwhelmed, and the freedom you dreamed of having when you started out is nowhere to be found.
