[Free Book Preview #5] ~ RIGHT BUSINESS RIGHT LIFE? - From Fed-up Employee to Freed-up Entrepreneur

Hey there, Freedom Seeker!?

Welcome to my world, the exhilarating big sky of small business entrepreneurship!

I wrote a book for you! This book reveals Stage I - The Research - of the?Right Business Right Life??formula, which is developed from a decade-long career in the trenches of American Main Street and online business as a small business entrepreneur and a coach. Its objective is to help you become the successful creator of the new life you envision by objectively guiding you in?researching and choosing?the right business.

In the next weeks, I'll share free sections of the book with you before it's released for publication and available for purchase.

CHAPTER 3 - Discover the Secret to Success as a Small Business Owner

If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work. - Khalil Gibran

The Right Business Right Life secret to success as a small business owner is deceivingly simple: Choosing the business that is in ALIGNMENT with who you are and the life you dream of is the 20 percent effort that results in 80 percent of your success in business and life.?

It is worth repeating. The Right Business for the Right Life is all about ALIGNMENT. The research you’ll conduct to identify the right business for you is the 20 percent of your effort that will deliver 80 percent of the results in long-term success and happiness with your business.

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Running a business is challenging enough; why not stack the odds in your favor? The closer you are to your best-suited business, the easier and faster your success will be, and the more fulfilled you will be.

Your life’s most important priorities, your strengths, and your life purpose are key conditions to monetary success and living a meaningful life. How well-aligned you want your business to be with each of these requirements is entirely up to you. It is your business and your life.?

The graph below illustrates the alignment mechanism between you and your business.

Three key characteristics give us a good idea of whether a business is a good match for its future owner and vice versa. The business they choose should be at the intersection of

• Their purpose and values
• Their ideal life as they envision it, which is titled LIFE+ in our methodology?
• Their strengths as future leaders of a particular business

Your Values and Life Purposenbsp;

First, let’s clarify what exactly is a life purpose. A business that actualizes your life purpose results in a business for which you spring out of bed in the morning to run it, grow it, and create for it. A purpose is not the same as a passion for a hobby or an activity, however. Passion is what we do for ourselves because we enjoy what it does for us—things like hiking, running, yoga, art, surfing, knitting, golfing, etc. Our purpose is what we do for others and why we do what we do. Our purpose is how we make an impact. It is what makes us face adversity and obstacles with persistence and faith. If “purpose” were an emotion, we could call it “true love.” True love is long-lasting, giving, forgiving, and resilient. Passion alone isn’t.?

I am fortunate to have discovered not just my purpose but also the vehicle to actualize it: my business. It makes my life meaningful. It helps me be more resilient to whatever challenges come my way. I also know how miserable it feels when our business doesn’t fulfill our purpose. Starting a business by following your life purpose is not absolutely required to be successful. However, it adds a tremendous dimension to a life well-lived.?

So, how do you align your ideal business with your life purpose? First, you need to determine what your life purpose is. Next, you need to find and fix a problem related to your purpose with a business that offers the solution.?

Please reach out if you are not sure what your life purpose is. We can help you walk through exercises and assessments that will reveal your life purpose to you and align it with a business. Here is the link to book a call:?

www.rightbusinessrightlife.com/discovery

Uncovering your life purpose requires an assessment of:

• The history of significant life events that have defined you.
• Your high values.
• Your genius zone: what you can do well and what comes naturally.
• What inspires you. What is your muse??

Once you identify your life purpose, the next step is to identify the business that can be the instrument to actualize it:?

• Identify a problem, an annoyance, or an inconvenience that screams to be resolved for that purpose.
• Research a solution to fix that problem.?
• Create a business model to deliver the solution.

Aligning a Business with Your Life Priorities

This is a simple yet often overlooked effect of business ownership. A business you own can be the vehicle for a life that makes sense for you. We use five practical characteristics of a satisfying life that a business can deliver for you. It makes the acronym LIFE+. LIFE+ stands for Lifestyle, Income, Flexibility, Equity, and + your key milestones. Brainstorming on what exactly each means to you guides you in identifying your ideal business and then verifying that it can deliver the life that fits you.?

LIFE+ doesn’t include everything that makes up happiness, of course. For example, it won’t help you determine who you are going to love and share your life with or the friendship you will nurture. However, it can allow you to prioritize your time based on who and what matters the most to you, hence creating an environment where your relationships with others can thrive. LIFE+ addresses the five key elements of a gratifying life that a business can deliver.

The second step of the internal research found in the RBRL Formula is to identify your LIFE+. In the following chapters, we will expand in detail each step of the LIFE+:

• Lifestyle: How you want to spend your time, when you want to work, and when you want to have free time
• Income: How much money you want to make, both now and later
• Flexibility: What your ideal location(s) is from where you want to live and work?
• Equity: How much equity, if any, you wish to build in your business and contribute to your wealth
• + your milestones: The noteworthy accomplishments and experiences you want to check off your bucket list and have no regrets about 20 years from now

If you play your cards well, each of these priorities will be enabled by your business over the next 10 years or more. Once you have clarity on your priorities, we will create a decision matrix by giving weight to these objectives and quantifying how well-aligned they are with the businesses you are considering.?

Leveraging Your Strengths with a Business to Succeed Better and Faster

Even though we understand that aligning our strengths with any career is critical to our professional success, it is not uncommon for folks to pick a career or job for other reasons: family influence, social status, convenience, the promise of money, easier success, etc. The same goes for business ownership—after all, it is a career too.?

As we discussed in the previous chapters, when compared to getting a job, entrepreneurship has a relatively low barrier to entry, possibly causing a high rate of failure. When you become an entrepreneur, particularly a small business entrepreneur—without outside investors that evaluate you as well as your brilliant idea—you need to be both your own uncompromising interviewer deciding if you should “hire” yourself and the interviewee exploring the pros and cons of the job. The goal is to determine if the role you are about to take on is a good fit for who you are today. In a venture-capital-funded start-up or partnership, financiers will go to great lengths to confirm you are capable of success, their money is relatively safe, and the potential return on investment is enticing. As a sole investor, you are the only judge.?

Three types of strengths comprise your career capital when considering your entrepreneurial journey: your technical knowledge, your business skills, and your strengths in social behavior. Your career capital is the compilation of all your experiences, whether within the context of a job or through roles you assumed unofficially.?

• Core competencies: Through education, training, and experiences, you’ve acquired various technical skills or core competencies. The best way to identify your competencies is to chronologically list all the roles you have assumed, even as a child or young adult, and to consider which activities have contributed to your career capital. Some of these skills you enjoyed learning, and for others, you learned how much you disliked them. They all give you clues to determining which are worth exploiting or avoiding as a business owner.?

• Social behavior: Strengths in social behavior are not as easily detected. I thought I intuitively knew what my social behavior strengths and weaknesses were. Yet it was only when I took a psychometric assessment and worked with a coach, confirming or discovering what I had guessed about myself, that I was able to understand why I failed in some areas and succeeded in others. The most important social behavior when you own a business is your leadership style, even if yours is a solo business with no employees. Other behavioral strengths to consider are your analytical, communication, social influence, and strategic characteristics and your affinity for or aversion to change. You don’t need to excel in all of these areas. The key is to know which of your strengths your business will require and what you should outsource or delegate to others.

• Learning new skills: No doubt, business ownership requires stepping outside of our comfort zone to grow our business and ourselves. It is critical, however, to assess what we need to add to our repertoire of skills and how much time it will take us to get there. When you are considering getting into a business for yourself, the objective is to minimize the length of time that it will take to get to the break-even point and profit. The early stage of growth in any business is a particularly vulnerable stage. The danger of picking a business that requires you to step way outside of your strengths is not that you are incapable of learning the new skills needed. The danger is that you might take too long to become good enough to lead the business to profits. According to the Small Business Administration, 29 percent of businesses that fail do so because they run out of money. Many owners I interviewed ran out of money because they took too long to be effective in their new roles. They could have made it easier and faster to succeed by first getting into a business that leveraged their strengths.?

• In business, time is more finite than money: In short, pick your battles carefully. Still, if you decide to pick a business that has many attributes you love but that is not a great match to your current excellence in skills and knowledge, don’t hesitate to outsource, hire advisors, and engage coaches to speed up your results. It is more cost and time-effective than taking too many months and years to figure it out on your own through trial and error.

Your journey to small business success begins with the most seamless alignment between who you are and the business you select. It’s essential to take a deep dive into understanding your life purpose, your vision of an ideal life, and your strengths before committing to create or buy any business. With RBRL, you’ll prepare your navigation plan as a business owner. This research phase is the time when we define the destination and fit the captain’s skills to the right vessel for our life journey ahead.

Key Chapter Takeaways:

• The secret to success in business begins with the perfect alignment between you and the business you pick. The RBRL Formula prepares you to overcome the flaws and common traps of business ownership and makes your ascent to success easier and faster.
• If you have a life purpose you are passionate about, you already have an advantage! Starting a business that actualizes your life purpose is a powerful accelerator to success. Your life purpose doesn’t need to change the world; it simply needs to fire you up above and beyond the money you’ll make.
• We each have our definition of an ideal life. Not only that, what’s important to you today might not be as critical in a few years. Decide how you want to live in order to pick the business that can facilitate that life.
• Leverage your strengths. First, you need to gain clarity of your strengths and genius zone so that you can transfer them to the right business. These strengths might be skills, social behavior, or establishing a balance between what you should learn as a new owner and what you should outsource or delegate to speed up your success and profitability point.

PS: Joining the VIP Waitlist: Would you like to be among the first to access your copy of the book as soon as it is released and receive a bonus book companion coaching session?

During the private coaching session, I’ll guide you through the exercises and templates in the book. Available to the first 20 VIPs who purchase the book. To join the VIP waitlist, click?here.