The balanced business owner
by Kelly Schwedland
To be an effective business owner it requires a balance of personalities. In every business owner there are three different people; The Entrepreneur, The Manager and The Technician.
The Entrepreneur is the part of you that had a dream about one day owning your own business, being free from your boss, and dictating your own schedule, to work or not. The entrepreneur is the part of you that loves to dream about how it could be someday. The visionary part of you that may have only existed for only a moment but drove you into business for yourself.
The Manager is the part of you that wants to be organized, that wants a place for everything, and wants to create all those little things in business that you know you should have butt never get around to doing. This is the side of you that loves to go to the local office supply store and buy folders to put everything in and color coded stickers to match one item with another.
The Technician is the part of you that just has to get it done. This is the part of you that wants to jump in and do the work because you know it won’t get done unless you do it, and certainly you take great pride in the work that you do. After all that was why you went into business or your self because you could do it as good as everyone else, that’s what your customer was paying for right?
The problem with most business owners is that the owner is responsible for being all three people and that it requires all three people to effectively run a small business. However the reality is that many small business owners don’t have a balance of all three personalities. That in fact, while all three exist in each and every one of us the problem that most business owners fall into is utilizing all of one type of personality and not being balanced. Usually this is the technician.
It was the entrepreneur that pushed you into being in business. The manager that realizes that things just don’t run the way they should and that the systems aren’t in place to run smoothly. But it is the technician that ultimately wins out because there is just too much work that has to get done.
It is very much like that part of us that always wants to start on that exercise program and get healthy. Then goes out and invests in the equipment or the membership. Then after the first or second day or maybe a week the other us comes back and decides that it doesn’t want work out today and six weeks later we wonder what ever happened to working out.
The first step is realizing what needs to get done in your business. You have to have a clear balanced approach to build a business that works. This means spending time each day, yes each day, not just working in your business as the technician but also working on your business as the entrepreneur and the manager. This means spending the time to visualize what the business should look like when it is complete and then planning and strategizing on how you are going to get there from here.
Certainly not everyone can naturally be all three people. So you need to put mechanisms in place to hold yourself accountable to doing the work on your business. You have to have a balance of all three personalities to make your business work.
Kelly Schwedland is president of American Business Dynamics, a small business consulting firm focused on issues related to growing companies.