JUNE 29, 2018

 
As an entrepreneur, your daily routine consists of various necessities: client meetings, returning emails and phone calls, texting back your spouse/kids about tonight’s ball game, squeezing in lunch when you can; but in between it all where do you find time to mindfully focus on your true passion?

 

We’re talking about your love affair with the business. Your business needs the nurturing and close attention just as your marriage or any other meaningful relationship does.

 

Keeping the passion alive boils down to three pieces: your mission, your profits, and your business plan. The combination of the three helps to keep your people on board, quantifies the cost, and allows you to make the pivot fast.

 

Establishing a clear mission forces you to deliberately make investments in your passion. Similar to checks and balances - this process helps to ensure you are on the right path.

 

Your path evolves over time! Year one in your business journey your mission could simply be survival. Year two could be a building block year – trying to figure out what that passion/purpose truly is. Then the third stage would be defining your passion exclusively and operating to that each day (in process and practice).

 

Your mission is your guiding light fueled by your passion. It is critical not to lose the spark. The kicker then is constantly reconciling that mission of the business with the profitability of the business.

 

The goal is making investments as you go. Fresh can mean your mission evolving, a rebranding, a new location; all of these things are building blocks to keep it fresh. You have to keep the passion and the mission fresh, but “fresh” can be defined as a five year period of time, it doesn’t have to be every month.

 

Your level of passion is heightened during this process as you’re keeping it new and exciting so it is important not to get lost in the moment and lose sight of your business plan. Checks and balances, remember? The sooner you can make this part of your culture as an organization, the better off you may be.

 

 

Your business plan, that is. If you can get good at utilizing the business plan to predict profitability, you are more likely to be on the right track.

 

When you have a process that forces you to relate everything back to your business plan you can make go/no go decisions from this plan and quantify those decisions. You can make projections as outlined in the plan but if it doesn’t work, you can pivot. This will help you pivot more effectively and efficiently. You can help control your losses!

 

You have to understand, you are always going to have losing ventures and/or ideas. The kicker is, good entrepreneurs have controlled loses; meaning they fail fast. This projections helps make the staffing piece of your organization much more obvious as well. – That transcends from professional service firms to manufacturing companies.

 

As you grow you need a process for reconciling the mission of the business with the profitability and the business plan (all of those things together). The way these three pieces talk to each other is critical.