If you’re like most business owners who often search for opportunities and business advice at odd hours of the night, you’ve probably come across the advice that you should spend more time “working on your business, not in your business.”
Hearing this advice, accepting it and actually living it are three distinct stages.
I hope my story of working through these stages can assist others in their quests to create scalable businesses they will one day be able to sell and, in turn, create a legacy for their families.
Within a few months of starting my first business (a flight training business), I was regularly working six to seven days per week and often ten to twelve hours per day.
Success was within reach, and like most young entrepreneurs, I thought if I could just squeeze another few hours into a week, I would obtain it. I fell into the E-Myth trap, as described in Michael Gerber’s book by the same name.
Fortunately, I had a client who had successfully navigated the same entrepreneurial journey I was embarking on. He was one of my flight students who had started his business from scratch and had grown it to over 50 locations in several states.
I’ll never forget our conversation spurred by my usual small business owner complaints. He asked, “David, do you want to be a flight instructor or do you want to grow a business?”
Puzzled as to why these would be mutually exclusive I answered, “I want to grow a business.”
“Stop flying airplanes and work every day to ensure you’re offering compelling value to the community in a way your competitors will have trouble duplicating. Take a week off and make sure your model is profitable and scalable before wasting any more time.”
“You’re crazy. I can’t take a week off. I’ll lose customers. You don’t understand.” I was telling the successful millionaire entrepreneur he was the one who didn’t understand!
He didn’t give up and beat this message into me for months.
Finally, after several months, I realized he was right. There weren’t any more hours in the day for me to work. While I had been flying airplanes every day in a business that had grown only slightly, my competitors (some of whom weren’t even pilots) had been busy