Transitioning From Employee to Entrepreneur!
So, you’ve decided to take a faith leap and pursue your business goals full-time! Congratulations for getting this far. If there is one thing I’m learning, it’s that transitioning from an Employee to a Business Owner requires a change in our mindset. “If you act like an employee, you will be treated like one. I mean seriously, who wants to stay up night and day running a business just to be treated like a regular employee?? Remember you are a business owner supplying a service to your clients. So many new business owners come on the scene but don’t seem to have a really good grasp of this concept and it negatively impacts their business and their clients.
If you don’t treat what you do as a business and from a business owner’s perspective, it will eventually impact how your clients treat you. You are not just providing a simple service, regardless of what that service is. You are a business owner striving to provide your clients quality services and/or quality products.
Always try to keep that business owner mentality in the back of your mind and it will help you, your business and your client in the long run. As a business owner, no one will be looking over your shoulder or monitoring your workflow. No one will tell you that you have to take lunch between 12:00 and 12:30. This may seem like a good thing – and it can be, but when you are juggling priorities for multiple clients instead of just one boss, marketing your business, networking, and doing your own administrative work in addition to your clients’, it’s vital to have a good system in place that accounts for all of these added responsibilities.
Organizing your time and schedule is one of those “boss things” we have to do. Establish hours of business and stick to them. Balance is the key. Balance between your work time, networking time and family is imperative. Let your clients know that you are not in your office all day, every day and let your family know how important it is that you need to work uninterrupted during your planned business hours. Most businesses start out with a home office. Working from a home office can make it more challenging to avoid the distractions of your non-work life during business hours – and by the same token, to leave your work “at the office” at the end of the day.
In all your organizing, you still have to remember to be the boss, the manager of yourself and staff if that applies. The buck stops with you. Customer Service begins and ends with you. Your staff will follow your lead. It’s important that as business owners we have discipline, motivation and passion because there will be days that get extremely hard but you can’t just put in two weeks’ notice and walk away. You have to fight through that and be a real boss. My goals for my business are to feed my passion, serve my clients and make a living while having the freedom to do whatever I desire to do at any time. Those are my bottom lines. If anything interferes with those bottom lines, it will be re-considered.
There is no one there to make the final decisions and carry the weight. It’s our weight to carry and we earn the rights to the benefits it breeds in the end. We have to be multi-taskers. We can’t perform like an employee…go to work, do a job and go home. We have to build the website (or at least give direction), prepare the invoices, follow-up on the invoices, follow-up on clients, communicate with clients, market the business, be vigilant with continuing education, and then still do the thing we are in business to do. Our mindset really has to change from employee to business owner to succeed! I know you are already rocking it so back to work! :-)
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