How Do I Optimize My Business with Optics?

Hi, I'm Colin Richards, and as president and founder of Lord and Richards, I’m excited to share our perspective on business and financial independence. I’m privileged to work with a fantastic team helping people from all walks of life, particularly those looking forward to ultimately stepping away from their jobs. They fall into two groups: those who work for someone else and those who work for themselves as business owners.

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In past discussions, I've dedicated a great deal of time, particularly for new and young business owners, on how to begin developing a plan for financial independence as a business owner. After you grow beyond the stage where you learn to pay yourself, you must move to the point where you run the business instead of the business running you. You must develop the mindset of a CEO, owner, leader, and investor in your business.

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Today, I’m looking once again at this multi-faceted topic, and I'm going to focus on one particular area. Now that you're ready to wear that hat as owner and CEO or investor, how do you optimize your business as an owner to take the next steps toward not being tied to our business? How do you move from the operator stage to the owner stage, and how do you set your priorities as a business owner to become financially independent?

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There are three key points to consider: structure, optics, and leverage. Today’s discussion is optics, the ability to see. I’m not referring here to being a visionary or being able to visualize.

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Many business owners will establish goals of achieving certain sales or revenue. In practice, these aren’t goals, but wishful thinking because there’s no clear plan to make them happen. You want to have standards and plans that answer questions regarding where the business is going, why, and how it will get there. We’ve found that standards get accomplished, but goals rarely do.? If you're an owner, and you have employees following your lead, you need to be the person who can “see more and see before”, as John Maxwell has famously said. Leaders see more than others. Their vantage point is like a mountaintop. They’re looking across a broader horizon to see what's happening in the business even before others see it.? They can see the danger approaching in that train coming down the tracks. That’s what optics is all about.

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Consider this. What you don’t see happening in your business, or what you don’t perceive as a threat, can cost you money. That’s the bottom line for any business. Your business needs to generate a profit unless it’s a nonprofit, but even then, it still needs to cover its expenses. One area you need to be watching is your accounting and financial statements. If you're not strong in those areas, you need to become proficient in the basic skills or have your accountant instruct you. Accounting is the language of business. We’ll be going into greater detail about financials in another discussion.

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You need to be aware of other aspects of your business as well.? Like your financials, they’re examples of what enables you to foresee, to see more, and to see before.

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We’ve talked about the need to set aside thinking time, quality undistracted time alone to ask yourself “great” questions, and then to follow up and act on the answers you get. Here's a great question to consider that falls under the optics category. What obstacle is in the way right now that’s stopping you from moving from point A to point B? If you want to get to the Land of Oz, as Keith Cunningham likes to say, what is preventing you from going from Kansas to Oz? Once you know where this boulder is, you can build the machine to get there. Keith Cunningham, my friend and business mentor, calls it the yellow brick road you're going to build, the pathway to success, point A to point B. There may be lesser point As and point Bs along the way, but you have a larger point A to B goal in mind. We would call this a standard. Once you know this, you can build a machine to get there.

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I’m not talking here about physical machines. I'm talking about an intellectual machine, a structure, a plan that helps you move around, over, or through the obstacle. First, you've got to understand what the problem is, using your dedicated thinking process. Then you build the machine to solve that problem. Too often, we mistake symptoms for the root problem and miss the underlying reality causing them. With some further thinking, the underlying problem becomes apparent. Then, build the machine to deal with it.

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I’d love to hear from you to discuss your financial future and how you can achieve financial independence without worry. It starts with just a simple phone call.