Why do I believe business success is just like healthy eating? Let me tell you …
I’m currently working with a fantastic nutritionist, Jane Rose-Land, who has made a massive impact on what I eat, how I eat and – most importantly – how I feel.
Jane is brilliant at what she does – and what she doesn’t know, isn’t worth knowing – so it was a really easy decision for me to choose her.
However, after the easy ‘yes’ choice, came the hard part; the necessary planning that committing myself to this new way of life. It’s a complete turnaround in how I approach eating, cooking and shopping. I even day-dreamed about how much easier it would be if I could have a live-in chef: “here’s what I can eat, now pop off and make me three delicious meals a day for the rest of my life”.
But I know that even if that was possible it wouldn’t do me any good because I wouldn’t be learning how to do this myself or how to manage after the support programme is over.
This dilemma demonstrates that big gap; the one between the ‘WANT’ and the ‘WORK’.
Want to Work and Passion to Profit
The gap between Want and Work is something I come across very frequently as a Business Mentor to Micro businesses. It’s the disconnection between the business owners goals (the Want) and the reality of what it takes to achieve them (the Work).
In no way am I saying that these business owners are work-shy. On the contrary, they are often working their socks off – but is it the right work?
So, when I say I take Micro and Side Hustle businesses from Passion to Profit what I mean is I help them bridge the gap between their Passion (what they want, or dream, of achieving) and the making a Profit in their business (the things they have to do to make their passion a reality).
The thing that is getting n the way of their business success is a huge amount of their hard work is taking place in the ‘passion’ side of their business activity and they haven’t built the bridge to the ‘profit’ side with simple planning, processes and systems.
If We Want Business Success We Have to Put the Work in the Right Places
I am all for people achieving things in their own way and on their own timescale; that’s empowerment. But when people shy away from the [these are words and phrases that some of my own clients have used] hard, tricky, boring, slog, time-wasting, non-productive [my word] ecessary work to achieve their goals it’s exchanging empowerment for entitlement.
And in business that just won’t work.
In business you can set yourself as many goals as you like – easy.
Then you have to do the work that turns those goals into a reality – hard.
Many of the people I work with did not always want to be a business owner. For many it came out of necessity after redundancy or a now-or-never feeling having been employed for many years or moving across the 50+ years barrier. They so often have a set of excellent skills, great communication skills and are totally dependable. But they don’t ‘know business’.
That’s why they make the rookie mistake of believing that, because they are great at something, know it inside out, have been doing it for years and they love it that others will love it too and be queuing up to buy it.
This is where I become …
The Bad-Guy
Why am I the bad-guy? Because I tell them that nobody loves their product/service but them. That just because they have a website and a business card it doesn’t mean they have a business. And the icing on the cake? I tell them to stop doing what they love and start working on [hard, tricky, boring, slog, time-wasting, non-productive] business.
I want all the people I work with to be really successful so I have to be forthright and honest so that they can move from entitlement (their right to start the business they want) to empowerment (managing their business responsibly so that they achieve their goals).
Yes, that sometimes means that that they have to do some things they don’t want to do.
We know that nothing worth achieving is ever easy; but there’s a difference between knowing and owning. In just the same as healthy eating. I know that eating a walnut whip three-pack from Marks & Spencer is not good for me, but …
In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell has calculated that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become really good at something. So, building a successful business from scratch isn’t going to be easy. And yet, many people who say they want to be successful entrepreneurs seem to want it to happen immediately or to pick and choose the things they do and don’t do.
Why Business Success is Like Healthy Eating
You can’t pick and choose or avoid the things you don’t want to do for one very simple reason: it’s usually those things that you need to do to succeed.
Eating unhealthy food and doing no exercise will seriously damage your health; avoiding the business and planning aspects of your business will seriously damage your wealth.