DO YOU OWN A JOB? Owning a company teaches you many things. You learn how to manage money, employees, customers, vendors and 9me. Most companies would pay quite a bit to have a person with your skills. A?er a difficult day - have you ever thought about going to work for somebody else? Here are three important thoughts to consider: Appreciate the difference between owning a business versus owning a low-paying job. One absolutely cri9cal way to look at your business is to step back, take a big-picture look, and figure out if you're making the money an owner should make, or whether you're doing all that work only to make what an employee would make. In other words, if both you and your company are not making money, you're working for everyone else instead of yourself, and losing money doing it. Take the dollar amount you pay yourself a year, and divide it by the number of hours you work per year, and make sure you count all the hours — the hours on the phone, in the office, at the job, selling, promo9ng — all the hours. That's how much you make an hour. Are you the highest-paid employee of your business? You should be, you‘re the most-important employee, and if you're not, you don't own a business, you own an overworked, underpaid job. Realize that customer expectaGons are rising, and prepare for an industry shakeout. You may already have no9ced how the industry is changing — the bar has been raised in almost every facet of the tent-rental business, par9cularly customer expecta9ons. More and more, customers are expec9ng professionalism, 9meliness, and clean, upscale tents that look new — the last thing they want their rented tent to look like is "just an old tent." In addi9on, more and more, fewer tent-rental businesses will be able to stay compe99ve as companies consolidate and grow in size. Now is the 9me to re-evaluate everything by taking a fresh, objec9ve look at the very business you look at every day. Comprehend why efficiency is more important than growth. So if your business isn't making any money, you, as its owner, its most-important employee, and its leader, are failing. You hate failure. And since you're already charging what the market will bear and the compe99on will allow, the obvious solu9on is to make more money by ren9ng out more tents, thereby increasing gross revenue and growing your business, right? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Over and over again, increased business and its resul9ng growth have been the death of companies like yours — par9cularly unprofitable companies. Why? Because the opera9onal inefficiencies that inhibited those companies' profits in the first place were only exacerbated when those companies grew. In other words, when a company grows, the impact of its number-
one problem — inefficiency — always grows faster than the company itself. So not only should you not grow your business un9l you have absolutely MAXIMIZED opera9onal efficiencies, maximizing efficiencies is, by far, the quickest way to increase your company's profitability.
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