Work on the business, not in the business.
What it means, why it’s important, and most importantly, how to do it!
If you’ve been in business for any length of time you’ve likely heard the advice to “work in the business, not on the business,” but what does that really mean?
It means, as your business’ CEO, you need to make sure that you’re carving out a portion of your time each day, week, month, and quarter to focus on the parts of the business that have nothing to do with executing client work and think strategically about ways to move your business forward. This can include:
Developing a vision for your business,
Identifying your target market and ideal client,
Creating a business plan,
Strategizing your marketing,
Expanding your marketable skill sets,
Innovating new services and products,
Reconnecting with previous clients, and
Defining and streamlining your systems.
Why is this so important?
Statistically, your business won’t survive if you don’t.
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, the failure rate of small businesses is pretty high:
20% of small businesses fail in their first year,
30% in their second year,
50% after five years, and
70% in their 10th year in business.
With this information in hand, Forbes took a look at the trends to identify the “Eight Common Reasons Small Businesses Fail”:
No Vision
No Niche
No Business Plan
No Marketing Plan
No Action
No Commitment to Learning
No Follow-up
No Consistency
In other words, they worked in their business, instead of on it.
After looking at all of the ‘reasons for failure’ lists I could find online (there are quite a few—just Google it), the most common reason a business fails is lack of capital and/or poor cash flow. In other words, the number one reason small businesses fail is that they don't have enough money in the bank.
I’m sure this doesn’t surprise you. Everyone knows that businesses need to make money to survive. It’s literally at the core of everything we do. Not because we think money is going to make us happy but because money is what makes our businesses a business—not just a hobby. It’s what makes it possible for us to pay our bills and do the things we want to do, and it’s what makes it possible for us to help others, too.
As my dad used to say, “Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it sure does make things a lot easier.”
So, then why do business consultants advise that to avoid this problem, you STOP doing client work—the very thing that brings money into the business—and focus on the things that don’t? Because each and every part of your business has a direct impact on its long-term health and success, regardless of whether or not they are directly connected to bringing money into the business.
You are only as strong as your weakest link.
Your business is like a body: it has multiple, independent parts. Each of these parts serves a unique and important purpose; without any one of them, the body wouldn’t be healthy or whole. Sure, it might “survive” for a while, but neglect a part for long enough and you’ll find your business has a compromised immune system and is more likely to be sick, underperforming, obese, or malnourished.
Makes sense, right? Then why aren’t you doing it?
Ain’t nobody got time for that.
If you’re like most solopreneurs, you’re neglecting the business side of your business because you’re a company of one, which means you’ve only got so much time in the day. You’re already doing your best to juggle the responsibilities of a professional, parent, family member, friend, and person. How could you possibly add one more “ball” to the mix—and feel confident that the rest won’t fall?
Choosing to work on your business likely means choosing to sacrifice another area of your life like having dinner with your kids or date night with your SO, which is a hard choice to make when you already have a full client roster and money coming in. You’d basically be choosing to sacrifice your happiness now for the possibility that something MIGHT go wrong in the future. And that just sounds crazy.
You’re in survival mode.
Another reason you might neglect the business side of your business is that you’re in survival mode. When you're in survival mode, the goal for each day is simply to survive the day.
Let’s face it: You’re stressed, and when people are stressed they tend to make decisions based on their instincts:
Feeling overwhelmed at all that you have on your plate? Work more hours.
Too much to do and too little time to do it in? Get more people doing more things.
Encounter a problem? Do something to fix it. Right now.
That problem you tried to fix still isn’t fixed? Try again. But this time, try harder.
Because of this, you are naturally not going to be strategic with how you’re spending your time and instead just focus on what’s in front of your face (e.g. client work).
You don’t know what you don’t know.
The third reason people don’t work on their business is they’re not sure what to do, or how to do it. Most people who work in a creative field didn’t get into business because they LOVE business. They got into it because they love their craft and wanted the freedom and flexibility they were told comes with business ownership.
Except most people don't talk about how successfully running a profitable business can be a large, overwhelming task. There’s a reason that people get degrees in it! So when you don’t have those degrees (and honestly, even when you do) and you’re trying to work within a limited budget or bandwidth, it can be hard to identify what is going to give you the biggest bang for your buck (and effort) let alone know how to execute it yourself.
It’s simpler than you think.
Every small, service-based business has seven primary components that should be consistently cared for throughout the entire life of the business for it to withstand the test of time.
I like to call these parts of the business “The 7 Pillars of Business Health”:
Personal Health & Wellness
Corporate-Level Strategy
Marketing & Sales
Recruitment & Team Growth
Financial Strategy & Management
Systems & Operations
Client Work & Experience
In the corporate world, all but one of these pillars is spearheaded by a C-level executive who likely has an Ivy League education and decades of experience honing their craft in just one area of the business.
Since you don’t have the luxury of being able to employ a C-suite, the first steps to caring for your business in the most streamlined and cost-effective way possible are
Educating yourself on the parts of the business and the ways they impact cash flow, and
Analyzing your current efforts to identify the areas that are already cared for and which areas could use a little love.
The 7 Pillars of Business Health
Personal Health & Wellness (Executive Coach)
Healthy businesses are run by healthy people.
As the company’s sole owner and operator, you are at the heart of everything, which means your business’ health is directly impacted by the state of your mind, body, and soul—including your cash. If you’re not fully functioning, it’s unlikely that your business will either. This is why it’s vital for you to ensure you’re in tip-top shape before you focus on building or improving any other area of your business.
The Personal Care & Development pillar is strengthened when you distribute your time, energy, and money between all seven areas of life in a healthy and balanced manner. This can include
Prioritizing “me” time.
Eating healthy foods.
Exercising on a regular basis.
Having a handle on your personal finances.
Keeping an organized home.
Getting tips and tricks to better manage your time.
How we can help.
To support you in this, Whitespace Consulting offers a variety of services that aim to do exactly that:
Personal Assistance
Time Management Coaching
Budgeting & Money Management
Wealth Planning
Home Design & Organization
Nutrition & Fitness Coaching
Life Coaching
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapy
Corporate-Level Strategy (CEO)
Slow down to speed up.
The next Pillar of Business Health is Corporate-Level Strategy. Here you identify your business’s core values, mission, target market, and the services and products that best align with who you are, what your ideal customer wants, and how you can help them get it.
While the term “Corporate” is likely to bring to mind images of suits, ties, and skyscrapers, a corporate-level strategy isn’t just for corporations. All businesses, big and small, benefit from this type of long-term strategic thinking, but it is often neglected by owners of businesses of your size because it requires the person to intentionally pause—and go deep, two things that are incredibly hard to do when the majority of your time and mental energy is being spent running around like a chicken with their head cut off, putting out fire after fire.
Which is unfortunate because this pillar’s function in your business is similar to that of the bones in your body: It provides the framework upon which everything else is built. Without it, you’re just a puddle of skin and organs. (Gross.) Which makes you extremely ineffective. I mean, imagine trying to get that puddle to move forward or grow. Impossible right?!
By identifying where you’d like to go, how you plan to get there, and what you’re unwilling to compromise or sacrifice along the way, you’re giving yourself what you need to filter through the noise, make good decisions, and generate the motivation and focus you need to put them into action.
How we can help.
Whitespace is passionate about helping business owners like you build and strengthen their business’ “bones” as it were so that they can pivot, grow, and scale their business “body” with ease.
Business Consulting & Optimization
Corporate Strategy
Business Assessment
Action Planning
Research & Analysis
Offer Design & Pricing
Marketing & Sales (CMO/CSO)
Consistent, high-quality leads turn into consistent, high-paying customers.
Marketing & Sales, the third Pillar of Business Health, involves you building upon the decisions made at the corporate strategy level by using it to identify how the company will stay ahead of current and potential competitors, bring in new prospects, and convert them into customers. Think of it like the face and skin of your organization since it’s the outward-facing part of the business that everyone can see.
For the most part, I think most people accept, even if reluctantly, that marketing and sales are a necessary part of any business’s success but when researching the reasons behind small business failure I found that ‘unsuccessful marketing’ (or something similar) always landed somewhere within the top 3.
Why do you think this is?
In my experience, this is because small business owners solely rely on word-of-mouth and referrals. Referral marketing is a great way to build your business’s reputation, but it’s also inconsistent, often misaligned, and at some point, it dries up! When it does you’re stuck scrambling to establish an online presence and get quality leads—things that take a fair amount of time to gain traction—while your bank account quickly dwindles down to nothing.
On the other hand, healthy, long-lasting businesses regularly strategize for their long-term survival by creating and following marketing strategies that align their offers with their customer’s needs, clearly communicate their benefits, and convert them into loyal, paying customers.
How we can help.
Get the tools you need to ensure you’re spending your time and dollars consistently speaking to your ideal customer about how you can solve their biggest problems by leveraging your greatest strengths.
Branding & Messaging Strategy
Marketing Strategy
Design & Development
Marketing Management
Reputation Management
Sales Consulting & Training
Customer Service Training
Recruitment & Team Growth (CHRO)
Yes, even if you’re a team of one.
As members of the productivity and efficiency community, we frequently hear consultants, coaches, and experts advise small business owners to outsource and delegate “lesser” tasks to someone like a virtual assistant to free up time for them to focus on the more important parts of the business. This sounds all well and good until you look at the potential costs (and heartache) that comes with it.
Did you know that it takes an average of 6 months for a new hire to become a profitable member of the team? That’s right: 6 months. And it costs the average company up to three times a position’s salary to search for, hire, pay, train, and integrate that new employee.
Ouch.
And even if you find the diamond in the rough who is able to get a handle on everything more quickly, the truth of the matter is they’ll never be you. You are, and always will be, your best employee—and the most expensive. No matter how many times you say it, you are not FREE: You are the most costly employee of the bunch, and you’ve already invested a lot of time and money to get you where you are today. Don’t let that become a sunk cost! Carve out time to focus on your own professional development and growth.
How we can help.
Whitespace offers a suite of services geared toward helping you to be the efficient, highly effective, leader, you’ve always wanted to be—and help you to find, manage, and retain the right, competent “helping hands” when you’re ready to take your first steps from employee to employer.
Leadership & Executive Coaching
Performance Improvement
Time-Management Coaching
Organizational Design (Putting people in the right seats on the bus.)
Human Resources Consulting
Team-Building & Communication
Transition Strategy & Change Management
Financial Design & Management (CFO)
That which is measured and reported improves exponentially. — Karl Pearson
Ahhh finance. Finance is the area of the business that most owners like to avoid like the plague. Which is ironic because without it your business is “dead.”
Money is the life’s blood of your business.
Every business owner wants his/her business to be profitable. The problem is most of them equate more profit with more sales—and they couldn’t be more wrong. The first step to profitability is being a good steward of the money you already have. If you don’t know what you want to do with it once you get it, and how to treat it well, more money will only exacerbate the problem.
As Mike Michalowicz so wisely said, “Money is an amplifier of habits. If you have bad habits and receive lots of money, you will simply repeat your bad habits more often. If your habits are good, it will amplify those good behaviors. Money allows us to be more of who we already are. So we better have a strong mindset and have established good habits before we get gobs of money. When you have achieved a strong, focused, happy mind and are executing on good habits, money will come easily. And money will build more money. And good habits will grow. Happiness, too. That is the healthy way to get rich.”
So, if you’re in it for the long haul and want to get rich the healthy way, you need to be able to (at the very least) understand your business finances. This doesn’t mean that you can’t outsource your bookkeeping tasks or look to your accountant for advice. It means that you need to know what you’re looking at when you’re reviewing financial reports and how to use this information to make confident business decisions that keep and grow the money you have worked so hard to make.
How we can help.
If the thought of dealing with numbers and spreadsheets makes you want to do floor angels, contact us to learn more about our financial strategy and management services that will undoubtedly strengthen this pillar of your business while you focus on the other parts that are a little less torturous.
Financial Consulting
Financial Strategy & Design
Auditing & Account Cleanup
Bookkeeping
Money Mindset Coaching
Systems & Operations (COO)
Optimize your business, elevate your life.
Once you’ve maintained a successful business for a length of time, you’re going to hit a point where it is no longer sustainable for you to do everything yourself and are ready to hire someone to help with the day-to-day tasks.
In my experience, this first hire is the hardest hire because it naturally forces you to work in a completely different way than you ever have before: Instead of doing it yourself, someone else is doing the thing on your behalf. Ideally, in a way that at least somewhat resembles the way you would do it yourself—or at least gets the same results.
The challenge is they don’t have the knowledge, history, and skills you do—the stuff that made you so perfect for the job. Which means for them to have any level of success, you’re going to need to get what’s in your head, out.
PRO TIP: Start doing this BEFORE you need to hire someone.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve waited until my breaking point to get some help only to find that adding another person to the mix not only didn’t help—but hurt—my productivity, sanity, and my business’s bottom line. I guess I was hoping that I could find a way to magically “mind meld” with them because I didn’t have the infrastructure in place to quickly and easily give the person the information they needed to effectively take things off my plate. Because of this, they couldn’t function without my constant involvement and still produced sub-par work. What a waste!
By directing your attention to your business operations sooner rather than later, you will lay the foundation you need to build, grow, and scale your business with ease.
How we can help.
Whitespace offers a full suite of operationally focused services that are customized to your business type, size, developmental stage, and growth goals.
Operational Design & Optimization
Process Design & Improvement
Workspace Design & Organization
Operational Support
Executive Assistance
Project Management
Digital Asset Organization & Management
Client Work & Experience (CXO)
Where the magic happens.
The Client Work & Experience pillar is the part of the business in which you create great work for your clients while giving them a positive experience throughout the process.
We know this is the area where you already excel, so there’s nothing that we can say or do to help you, other than to say, bravo! Keep up the good work!
Put it into action.
All right ladies and gents, this is where the rubber meets the road!
Now that you have a better understanding of The 7 Pillars of Business Health, it's time to put this knowledge to work and create a plan that fosters its health and wellness—and yours. (Don’t let Forbes’ No. 5: No action, be your downfall!)
To start, grab a fresh sheet of paper (or open a new Google doc) and list each of the seven pillars, leaving space to write below each one.
Personal Health & Wellness
Corporate-Level Strategy
Marketing & Sales
Recruitment & Team Growth
Financial Design & Management
Systems & Operations
Client Work & Experience
Next, brainstorm the activities or projects that would strengthen each pillar and improve your business’s cash flow.
Then, identify which actions you’re already doing and which ones you aren’t.
Finally, select at least one action from each group that you’re not already doing and add it to your calendar or project management system.
Each week spend at least one hour reviewing the progress you’ve made thus far (celebrate it!) then repeat the process listed above to select the action you’ll focus on next.
Simple doesn’t mean easy.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how simple the process is, if you don't have the time or the mental capacity to tend to all seven pillars of your business on your own it just isn’t going to happen.
Don’t worry! That’s why we’re here!
Whitespace Consulting’s services are specifically designed with your sanity in mind. Take advantage of our seasoned team of experts at the ready to solve your company’s biggest challenges by contacting us today to see if we can help you to
Gain some objectivity to find the primary source(s) of your pain.
Break this beast into smaller more manageable parts.
Identify what’s most important to address first, second, and third.
Create a step-by-step plan to achieve your goals that you’ll actually follow.
Know what you can outsource and delegate (and how).
Keep you accountable and on track to making your business a long-term success!
Let’s start at the very beginning. (A very good place to start.)
To do this, I recommend that every business starts with a Holistic Business Assessment, no matter what symptoms your business body is experiencing. Because: If you’re in the wrong hole, digging faster or smarter isn’t going to help.
By starting with an assessment we’ll ensure that whatever we’re doing is actually going to solve the problem and that it's going to yield the results we’re looking for so that your time, energy, and money are being spent on the areas of the business that need it most.
Click here to schedule a FREE 30-Minute Consultation to get started.
