This being-in-business game can be really really tough.
Whether it is navigating your time between family life and the demands of being the backstop for every work issue in your business, or trying to juggle the finances between fruitful years (lots of tax) and not so fruitful years (still lots of tax!). There always seems to be something you need to be doing, should have done already, absolutely must do.
It can get pretty overwhelming!
When you finally get a sec, some stolen time from something else you should be doing, you allow yourself a moment to take stock.
Is all the stress worth it? What do you actually WANT out of this life choice of being a business owner? If you can think of all the things you want to keep making it worthwhile, what are those things?
And most importantly, how do you bring the things you want into the forefront? How do you truly make being in business worth your time and energy?
These things might look like :
Figuring out how to manage your time so you can actually GET to your kid’s sports
Making sure that enough money drops out the bottom of the business to pay the mortgage, pay for private school, have a holiday each year
Long game, planning for a potential sale of the business providing you with a nest egg to retire with
Planning for what happens after the business… what kind of life do you want then? How much money do you need to retire on?
Plan and Process
It IS a bit of crystal ball gazing, and I can guarantee that during different ages and stages the wish list will change, but the reason why I’m even talking about this stuff, is because your business can drive it ALL.
Yes you have to plan, yes you have to create process within your business to be able to achieve it, but absolutely there is no reason why your business can’t give you everything that makes living awesome.
How do you do that? Firstly, you have to make the list of priorities.
Anything financial, you need to work into your margins. If your margins look too high, then you need to quote more jobs. You need to run your jobs efficiently using the pricing document as a road map so no margin slips through the cracks to pay for mistakes.
You need to create organization, the best builders I know have a day a week set aside just for sales…. Use your calendar like a bible and adhere to it.
Ever heard the saying a stitch in time saves 9? It’s better to act or deal with problems immediately, because if you wait and deal with them later, things will get worse and the problems will take longer to deal with.
Put yourself on PAYE, and use Kiwisaver! Its basically free money!
If I were you, I’d talk to your accountant about what you want to achieve, even things like pre-planning when you want to borrow money from a bank so you can spend the year before keeping the books clean so finance is less of an issue.
After all – we gotta make this being in business thing worth our while!