How do you envision living an entrepreneurial life? The terms entrepreneur, sole proprietor, small business owner, freelancer, and sole practitioner are often used interchangeably, but they don't mean the same thing.
Entrepreneurship is a long journey and has its different seasons. For instance, you may have been freelancing for a while to get some extra money on the side. Then you probably caught the entrepreneurial bug and decided to make it official and become a sole proprietor or a single-member LLC, which eventually turns into a small business.
Learning how to delegate
Gino Wickman recently wrote The EOS Life® to cast a vision for the visionary, the business owner, the entrepreneur, the operator, or whoever is trying to figure out what it is they want in their business.
I think what I found surprising in the first chapter, Doing What You Love, is that it ended up being a chapter about delegation, and I wanted to just throw it out the window. Because when you're talking about learning how to delegate, mastering delegation, there are always four boxes, and you can never put everything you do in all those boxes because you can't remember all the things you do.
I think he's really casting a vision for visionaries inside EOS® organizations about what's happening.
The typical visionary loves jobs like research and development of products and services, building relationships, creating problem solving, selling, spending time with customers or clients, focusing on growth, building culture, strategic planning, and coming up with ideas. And I thought about how that just connected with a part of my soul that I thought no one knew about.
Having an accountability chart
Geno mentioned the accountability chart in The EOS Life® and I was like, “I'm never going to get away from it.” It has been so hard to get there, nail it down, and make it right, but to me, it’s worth it.
The accountability chart means everyone has a seat, and everyone that's sitting on the accountability chart is sitting in a seat that the business needs at that time. It also means that the seat is being taken care of by the right person, and that right person believes it too. That’s where there's magic. Then there's clarity on the lines of communication and who's having conversations with whom for their development and growth.
The good news is that, with the right accountability chart, you'll be doing what you love in your ideal entrepreneurial life.
Doing what you love with people you love
The next chapter goes into energy conservation and doing what you love with people you love.
So one of the things I found very impactful in this book was that there's a difference between people you love and people you love doing things with, and you need to know the difference. Because there are people you love that you don't necessarily want to be around.
When your leadership team meets every week, the meeting should be filled with laughter, intense debate, passionate discussion, high trust, and respect. You should look forward to working together and seeing each other.
Creating leaders and investing in your team and people
Part of our role is to create leaders. We're not creating helpers, we're creating leaders, and we really felt that way long before EOS®.
If you want to test your leadership, just put out the beacon that you just want to create more leaders. Trivinia Barber, one of our clients and a good friend of ours, always talks about the mirror and the magnifying glass, and how it is so rewarding.
If we think back to all the people who have walked through our virtual halls and walls at TBL, 99% of them have developed or gained a new skill.
We are courageous enough to do something different and encourage them to launch a business or get into a field they might not have ever been able to do at the time that they get it. And I love that about us.
Understanding what appropriate compensation looks like for you
This is definitely a feeling conversation for me when Geno talks about being compensated appropriately. We all have an idea of what we think we should be getting paid, what we think we're worth, and what we need versus what we want. It's just so tricky, but there is a number.
When you define those functions, roles, and seats and then attach compensation to them, it is less about feeling and more about what this is worth. And then you get up to the owner's box, and then there's a separate compensation that's a little more flowing.
That value conversation is really what you're trying to hit.
Finding time for your other passions
The EOS Life® also introduces that age-old concept of learning how to say no, so that you have the opportunity to say yes to the things that you want to pursue.
So the way you build this muscle is you say no a lot and you understand that you can't say yes to everything. My pastor once said, “You can't serve living water from a dry well.” So, if at the end of the day you're empty, you're not going to have any time to do anything else. And you need a full tank.
It takes a lot longer to fill your tank when you're depleted because there is literally nothing left. Whereas burnout is really situational and circumstantial, and there are some things you can do to revive and energize yourself, depletion is a whole different story. You can throttle along and do a few little things when you're burned out.
But when you're depleted, you can absolutely do nothing. It's going to take a lot more time and a lot more work to get that tank to fill up without all the leaky holes.
Living your ideal life
Sticking to your disciplines and not settling, trying to be aware when you're tracking back into old habits or old situations or old relationships that aren't energizing you and helping you live your ideal entrepreneurial life.
Be sure that you're pulling back the curtain and you're calibrating to get it back on track. This, to me, is the on track, off track conversation, and we all get off track at times.
If you want to learn more about living your ideal entrepreneurial life, check out Episode 105: Discovering How to Live Your Ideal Entrepreneurial Life.
