A recent nationwide survey commissioned by Australian business coaching provider, The Entourage, revealed that half of Australian entrepreneurs and business owners are working up to, and in some cases, above 50 hours per week.
Specifically, 32 per cent of respondents cited working up to 60 hours per week, and 15 per cent are working up to, and above 80 hours per week.
As the report stated, this workload is causing 35 per cent of business owners to spend inadequate time with their family, often missing important milestones with their loved ones due to work.
Moreover, the survey found that a massive 90 per cent of business owners believe that their business would fall apart if they stepped away for six months or more. Of this group, 30 per cent are not taking any steps to address the issue.
“It’s highly concerning and not at all surprising to see so many business owners sacrificing their health and well-being, while missing out on important family milestones due to the demands of their business,” commented Jack Delosa, founder of The Entourage.
“We know that business owners can build a successful and profitable business that is in balance with the rest of their life, when they have the right strategies to do so. We’ve helped over 3800 companies do exactly that over the last 12 months.”
To tackle this issue, Delosa is sharing his secrets to building a profitable business that can grow without the founder’s constant involvement at a technical, day-to-day level.
The Entourage’s business coaching programs are designed to empower entrepreneurs to grow their businesses sustainably and profitably, by ingraining tried, tested and proven strategies that remove key-person dependency on the business owner, while accelerating the growth of the business.
“Every day, we receive thousands of messages from business owners who, one way or another, feel trapped by what they’ve created,” Delosa said.
“People who went into business in pursuit of freedom – be that creative, lifestyle, financial, and in many cases, time freedom – and they are now experiencing anything but freedom.
“Instead, they’ve found that managing a growing business and team has just become another full-time job.”
Delosa has his top five pieces of advice for entrepreneurs to step out of the day-to-day, reclaim their time, and build a profitable business that can run without them.
Focus on revenue and cash generation
Delosa said your first priority needs to be growing the revenues of the company to a point where you can start to invest more capital into building the foundations of a sustainable business.
These foundations include more experienced people, a marketing and sales engine, a bigger team, product or service improvements, and the right technology.
Stop paying start-up wages
In the early stages, you hire the people you can afford. This is inevitable, Delosa said. But he said to think of people this way – you either pay in money, or you pay in time.
He believes one of the most common mistakes that keep business owners stuck is that they keep paying start-up wages even after their business has grown out of the start-up phase.
This isn’t sustainable and as the business grows, he said business owners need to hire senior talent that can help them run and manage the business without their constant oversight.
Make the mental switch from ‘me’ to ‘we’
Delosa believes that the most expansive belief business owners routinely subscribe to is the thinking that they need to do everything themselves.
In the early stages, Delosa said this may be true, but many business owners continue this habitual way of operating long after it ceases to be necessary.
He said that your business and your mental health will improve significantly once you get out of the trenches. And, “once you have the revenues, you then build your team, then your team builds the business”.
Unlock sustainable growth through structure
As your business grows, Delosa said so should your team, your systems, specificity around roles and targets, precision around measuring results, and the scoreboards that give you (and everyone in your team) complete visibility of performance.
According to Delosa, if the fear of losing control is rearing its head, it’s an indication that you don’t yet have these things in place. He said that when you grow structure, scale gives you more control, not less.
Invest in your ongoing development
It may seem counterintuitive that the more successful an entrepreneur becomes, the more they engage in developing themselves, but it’s a universal truth, explained Delosa.
“If you’re growing as a person, your business is growing. If you’re plateauing as a person, chances are your business is stagnating too. You must constantly level up, so that your business can also grow without your direct involvement,” Delosa concluded.