I read an article this week on linked-in where the writer had challenged herself to take a whole week off and totally switch off from work. And she reinforced the ‘totally’ bit. She wanted to spend quality time with her children for an uninterrupted week and was asking readers if they thought she could do it. My response was, “Yes! Otherwise, what’s the point?!”

And that’s the question I’d like to pose in this blog:
“Why are you really in business?”

With my clients over the years I’ve gleaned there are often three main reasons:

1. To make a difference. As Daniel Priestley so aptly put it, “To make a Dent”
2. To afford a certain lifestyle (financial freedom)
3. To have the time freedom to spend with family and friends.

You could almost combine 2 and 3 into the time and financial freedom to provide a great life for me and my family. And of course ‘be my own boss’ ‘get rid of the 9 to 5,’ ‘work at something I believe in’ are all in the mix.

But for many business owners I meet, the ‘making a difference’ is happening and often the ‘making money' (for financial freedom) is happening but what’s got lost is the pursuit of time freedom. That has often become a vague ideal that will happen somewhere down the line.

And of course when you’re younger you take your health for granted, you’re loving the buzz of your business. You’re energised and focussed and you’re driving your business forward. And that’s great…to a point.

So I would ask you to just pause, take a breath and think about what’s really important to you. Most often people will respond to this with one word - ‘family.’ And you may say that you’re out there working all the hours for your family but given a choice would your children want more money or more of your time? Okay, maybe not teenagers! But younger children; are they going to remember summers of great games on the beach, pony rides and ice creams, and bedtime stories with mum or dad, or a parent who was always too busy?

If you want great relationships with your children you can’t say, “Right I’ve got time now” and find they’re eighteen and about to leave home. And it’s not just about those wonderful memories you want for your children but for yourself too. You’ll never have this time again. Same for your spouse or partner.

Think about what’s stopping you from taking time off:

1. Have you not got people in place who you can delegate to?
2. Is it a trust issue? You have a team but don’t trust them to perform without you?
3. Are you struggling to let go as you still feel the need to micromanage ‘your baby’?

Small business owners are clearly passionate about what they do, so it’s no surprise that they find it hard to leave work behind on holiday. It can be a challenge also to totally switch off from work as technology has made it so much easier to stay in touch. I believe it’s crucial to take proper breaks to achieve an enriched life and avoid business burn out. 

This is why we at MPL exist. Our vision is to make business easier. To enable people to achieve financial and time freedom. 

The right team, recruited to your Big Vision and Values, simple logical and repeatable systems to follow, and a strong second line manager to whom you can delegate are the portals to freedom. 

If you want any help unlocking those door please take a look at our website: 
www.mariannepage.co.uk or email us at: hello@mariannepage.co.uk

Do one thing: Think about what’s really important to you and what may be preventing you from achieving it. Then act.

Good luck and thanks for reading :)

Does your other half complain that they see too much of you?

Do your kids groan ‘cos you’re taking them out for the day, again?

Are you the number one invite on your friends’ social calendar?

Do you never take your laptop on holiday with you?

No?

So you’re telling me you don’t have all the time in the world?!

Then let me ask you this: do you own your business, or does it own you?

We had a meeting with a new client recently, and we asked him how he felt about his business.  He paused for such a long time I can remember thinking, ‘this is going to be a loooong day’, and then he said just one word: 

‘’Resentful!”

“This ‘job’ - that’s what I call it now, totally owns me. It dictates my mood; my appetite, my energy levels. I think about it all the time. I lie awake fretting about it. It feels like my entire life is being sucked into a big black hole.

“I went out on my own to have more freedom - to spend more time with my wife and kids, and look at me now - working every hour God sends.

“Everyone told me I needed a team, but all that’s done is increase my workload - the tax, the paperwork, keeping on top of them. I’m sure right now they’ll be glued to their phones cos I’m not there. Arghhh….”

Of course he’s not unusual. 

In fact he could be a poster boy for the small successful business owner! Maybe he’s just like you?

You started small, right? Built a really great business, had loads of fun doing it, started taking people on. It was all ok for you too at first, and then… the wheels came off.  You lost your consistency, you lost your belief that people would perform for you, you began to work longer and longer hours to keep on top of everything.

But, and this may surprise you, even ‘the youth of today’ don’t come to work with the sole purpose of pissing you off. Nobody plans to have a bad day or do a bad job, especially not the people you hand-picked for your business.

The change you’re looking for doesn’t start with your people, it starts with you.

You want freedom, particularly time freedom? Then build strong foundations, that free your people first. 

Strong foundations built around:

Your Plans - showing your team what the destination is, and how you’re going to reach it together - the route map for them to follow

Your Processes - having a set way of doing what you do - a system for everything

Your People - only hiring people who match your values, and fit your team, and then training them to follow your set way of doing things

Your Performance Management - taking every opportunity to give constructive feedback, to correct, to praise.  Having regular performance reviews that reward excellence

Successful business is built on the consistent performance of high performing teams who know where they’re going and follow the business systems to take them there. Look to McDonald’s, to Virgin, to Apple if you doubt what I’m saying.

And you can have this too. Put your energy into building your foundations, and you will find your freedom.

Do one thing: take a look at your life and your business and decide if it’s time to change.

Thanks for reading :)

Business owners, will you be keeping one eye on your e-mails on Christmas Day? According to recent research 1 in 5 of us will be. I can picture it now, a sneaky look at your phone secreted under your Christmas napkin and then all hell breaking loose when you’re spotted!

These stats make for interesting reading:

• 75% of UK small business owners will work to some degree during the entire festive season
• A mere 12% of small business owners expect to switch off for the whole of the Christmas period
• Around 60%  working on Christmas Day will work more than six hours, with 18% working more than ten
• Over 60% who do take Christmas Day off will be straight back on Boxing Day

You could expect these figures for Christmas Day if they were coming from the hospitality industry, and of course retail returns with a bang again with Boxing Day sales, but these are across a wide range of SMEs. So what about other owners? Some will take the ‘down’ time to catch up on paperwork, some to think about the coming year and some may just want the excuse to escape from relatives.

For many though it’s the pressure of having to keep up with work. The ‘one man band’ may not have a choice. Larger businesses work over the festive period perhaps because the owners don’t trust their team and manager(s) to run things without them. It’s said to be the reason why so many businesses in the UK remain in ‘startup’ mode instead of scale-up.

So if you have a team but you still need to supervise and double check their every move, take a moment to think about ‘why?’ And then, what better time with the New Year approaching to think about what you’ll do to change things. 

Michael Gerber says in the E-Myth,

“If your business depends on you, then you don’t own a business, you have a job, and it’s the worst job in the world, because you’re working for a lunatic!’’ 

He’s right, because quite often, as business owners, we are lunatics. We’re control freaks. We’re demanding. Demanding of ourselves. We insist on long hours and hard work, and really, that’s the technician, in us, the person who feels that they have to do everything.

Serious business owners and entrepreneurs can take time off whenever they want and their income still comes in. They have two fundamental things: 

• They have systems
• They have good people to run those systems.

I’ll be taking a full two weeks off this festive season. I’m not saying this smugly, I’m saying it because it actually took me a while to get to this point.

To get to the point where I don’t feel guilty to get to the point where I can trust my team to do what needs to be done, where I have that level of trust. And to plan work so that I can also give my team a good break.

The trust that allowed me a totally switched off three weeks last Summer has come from having the strong systems in place that I need, having the team in place to get on and follow the systems, and achieve our goals.  We business owners talk endlessly about how to engage and reward people and what better way than enabling them to get on unhindered by our daily meddling. Ask yourself how you would like to work for someone constantly looking over your shoulder and that’s how your team will feel. Simple, logical, repeatable systems, and a good team to run them, are the root to stress-free holidays, to long weekends off, to any weekend off, and to financial and time freedom.

Holidays, for me, are absolutely vital for continuing to do good work for my clients, continuing to come up with new ideas, or better ways of doing things. That all just comes out of resting my brain, stopping the relentless running and rushing around to see clients, or to develop and deliver programmes. It’s really, really important that you take that time to rest and relax, and you can only do that, as a business owner, if you have the systems in place, if you have the team in place.

I’d love you to think about that, if you recognise yourself here. 

Simple, logical, repeatable systems, and a good team to run them.

Do one thing: Let this be your goal for 2019.

    •        you will not be working bank holidays
    •        you will not be working weekends
    •        you won’t be working 60 or 70+ hour weeks

Instead, you’ll be spending quality time with the people that you love, with your animals or whatever you love doing beyond your work.

Merry Christmas from all of the MPL team x

‘If your business depends on you, then you don’t own a business, you have a job, and it’s the worst job in the world, because you’re working for a lunatic.’

So says Michael Gerber in the ‘E-Myth’, the bible for so many entrepreneurs, and rightly so, in my opinion.

In the E-Myth, Michael Gerber talks about this whole idea of being a technician i.e. people who start their business because they’re really good at something. They’re a florist, an electrician, a carpenter. Or maybe they’re a dentist, and I pick on a dentist because I’ve just been to mine and his business is a good example so I’ll refer to this dentist as ‘him’. A dentist spends years and years learning his trade, honing his skills, learning everything that he needs to learn to be a really good dentist, to serve and satisfy this customers/patients.

So, you go to the dentist, either for your regular checkup, or because you’ve got tooth trouble. He’ll invariably sort you out. Ideally, he hasn’t caused you that much pain, and so you leave the dentist, and you tell everybody what a great dentist you have, and how it’s pain-free, and he’s lovely, and so on. In most cases, the dentist will do the job himself; certainly the one I go to, there’s rarely anybody else in the room during my appointment. Some may have an assistant or a receptionist  but mine is a self-contained system just like the electrician, or the carpenter, or the florist. They don’t really need anybody else.

The problem is that when the dentist goes on holiday, so does his income, because he is his own self-contained system. Really, this is a huge problem for many business owners, because as Michael Gerber says in the E-Myth, “If your business depends on you, then you don’t own a business, you have a job, and it’s the worst job in the world, because you’re working for a lunatic!’ He’s right, because quite often, as business owners, we are lunatics. We’re control freaks. We’re demanding. Demanding of ourselves. We insist on long hours and hard work, and really, that’s the technician, in us, the person who feels that they have to do everything.

Proper business owners and entrepreneurs can take time off whenever they want and their income still comes in. They have two fundamental things. They have systems, and they have good people to run the systems.

When I go on holiday for three weeks, I won’t be taking any work with me, and I don’t plan to get into it with the team while I’m away. I’m not saying this to boast. I’m not saying this to get you mad at me. I’m saying it because it actually took me a while to get to the point where I have that level of trust. That trust has come from now having the strong systems in place that I need, having the team in place to get on and follow the systems, and achieve the goals.  And I know that they’re going to get there. It took time, but I do trust that everything will go well. I trust that it’ll go better than well. They’ll probably do things that I wouldn’t have thought of, because that’s the sort of environment and culture that we’ve created, within the business. Simple, logical, repeatable systems, and a good team to run them, are the root to stress-free holidays, to long weekends off, to any weekend off, and to financial and time freedom.

Simple, logical, repeatable systems, and a good team to run them.

So let me ask you, what did you do this Mayday bank holiday? We’ve got another bank holiday weekend coming up shortly. Will you be having three days off work, or do you see it as a great opportunity to catch up on odd-jobs or to stop and take stock, because you never have time to do that when you’ve just been too damn busy managing the day to day palaver?

So will that long weekend be time off with your family and friends, or just relaxing and doing what you love to do, or are you going to be working? Now of course, there are always going to be business owners who really look forward to things like bank holiday weekends and Summer holidays because it’s when they make their big money. If you’re in the leisure industry, obviously that isn’t the time to take off, but I’m talking about generally. I’m talking about taking that precious time to rest, to relax, to recuperate, to re-energise.

Certainly holidays, for me, are absolutely vital for continuing to do good work for my clients, continuing to come up with new ideas, or better ways of doing things. That all just comes out of resting my brain, stopping the relentless running and rushing around to see clients, or to develop and deliver programmes. It’s really, really important that you take that time to rest and relax, and you can only do that, as a business owner, if you have the systems in place, if you have the team in place.

I’d love you to think about that, if you recognise yourself here. I’d love you to think about how you’re going to use the next bank holiday weekend. Great systems and well trained people equals financial and time freedom. So here’s my challenge to you;

by this time next year,

•     you will not be working bank holidays
•     you will not be working weekends
•     you won’t be working 60 or 70 hour weeks

Instead, you’ll be spending quality time with the people that you love, with your animals or whatever you love doing beyond your work.

If this resonates with you, but you feel a bit overwhelmed thinking of how to even begin, then we can help. We run a two day bootcamp where you can come away from the workplace, away from all the day to day hassle and distractions and start to work ‘on’ your business, not ‘in’ it, to quote Gerber again. Come along, with your team, to our Systems4Scale Bootcamp, where over those two days, you really get to work on your systems with our support and expertise. Our clients hit the ground running on their return armed, not just with know-how, but with the firm belief that this ‘freedom’ is achievable.

Do one thing: follow this link to find out more here

Our next Bootcamp is 13th & 14th June 2018 – email hello@mariannepage.co.uk to register your interest