Do you find yourself having a hard time setting boundaries for your business? Do you feel like there is no clear distinction between your personal life and your business? You may be thinking you are too close to your business, and it’s nearly impossible to let go of some of the duties. Or maybe you feel hesitant to publicly declare what you do as a legitimate business.
Many of us start a business by pursuing a passion and/or what we mastered as a working professional, and then we grow it organically from there. The downside to this is the line gets blurred between our personal life and our business. This also makes us feel like our business is an extension of ourselves, a part of our identity. At times, it gets too personal because of this.
If you want to scale your business, you have to start treating your business like a business.
A large part of this is because you are not going to do everything by yourself. You are going to need a team. If you deploy a team, then you need to systematize your processes. In order to systematize your processes, you need to pull all of them out of your brain and start documenting.
So, what can you do immediately to start treating your business like a stand-alone, profit-generating machine?
Just like many of you, I was once living a corporate life. Someday though, I knew I was going to leave this life, so I leveraged everything I could learn on the job. I was consciously “intrepreneurship’ing” within all organizations I worked for.
It was much later in my life I realized how fortunate that experience was and how much it impacted my business, which enabled me to skip most of the rookie mistakes. In a way, the experience allowed me to get right into making many more of the ‘other’ mistakes, but that is a story for another time. At least, I did not have to start from complete scratch, so I’d say I was fortunate.