How To Grow Your Business Garden
When you’ve been in control of every aspect of your business and you’ve been handling every little thing, you’re on the tools and working on as well as in your business, it can be hard to let go.?
Obviously you need to let go for your business to grow and scale. But how do you do that?
The problem for a lot of people is that they see their business as an extension of themselves. They have a lot of identity tied up in it. In other words “I am my business”. So for me, if asked what I do I could answer “I work as a business coach” or “I am a business coach”. It’s quite a different way of seeing things.?
If you see your business as an extension of yourself you can face lots of extra challenges. If it’s not doing well for any reason (and there can be lots of reasons outside your control like covid and the GFC) you might see?yourself?as a failure rather than the reality your?business?is not doing as well as you’d like.?
If you see yourself as the failure, you’re likely to get disheartened and feel less motivated. You might stop enjoying your business as much. And maybe even let your attitude spill over to your team.?
One of the ways to start to see your business as separate from you is to look at it like a garden. You can plant things, you can feed them, you can do your best to nurture them but it doesn’t necessarily turn out exactly as expected. And that’s ok.?
If you see your business as a garden to tend, you might be disappointed if something doesn’t work but, like a gardener, you would be thinking more like “that thing didn’t work – maybe it needs more nurture or maybe I tried it at the wrong time, or didn’t provide the right conditions for it to grow.”
In our garden we’ve had things not do well in some areas and flourish in others. We’ve had some things take ages to grow and some take over. Some plants are more needy than others and take more effort, especially in the beginning, until they establish themselves.?
Think about your apprentices – they’re like little seeds when you get them. Not much good in their current form but full of potential. You nurture their growth and eventually you get a good strong team member. If you let them try to manage on their own you might get lucky and have one that thrives all by themselves or they may never sprout and you wonder why they’re not going well.?
领英推荐
That’s why it’s important to keep this garden metaphor in mind. If you know you need to nurture the seeds, you won’t resent having to spend so much time on your apprentices in the beginning. ?
Just like a garden, your business will behave in some ways that are predictable and some that are not. You will try things that turn out differently than you expected. You will have some aspects that seem to be a grind to get going but you shift your perspective or you use a different approach and they flourish.?
Jon likes helping business owners and especially owners of trades businesses. Life can be a bit frustrating when you run a business and a trade business can be even more so.
If you're a tradie and you've got successful then you probably feel like your life is not your own, that you are always making sure everyone else is OK before you and you never get everything done. You probably work too many hours each week and take your work home with you and you probably don't make as much money as you should.
Jon reckons this stuff is fixable and that you can fix it by making some fairly simple changes to the way you do things. He should know, he's been helping people do it for a long time and he's seen the same changes work time after time. He lives in Byron Bay because he likes it and he doesn't surf because he says it's too hard but he likes beer and food very much indeed. He's written for various magazines and newspapers in his time. Mostly because they think he must know something if he's survived this long. His children disagree.
cited from?SMH, Money Magazine?