Business growth is often the commonly accepted end goal of all entrepreneurship. And growth usually means higher earnings, sales, and revenue. After all, you want to reap the rewards of more income and gain a better lifestyle. As a business owner, the path to get there seems to be generating more clients and more dollars.
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But there’s a darker side to business growth. As the business grows, so do the cost, complexity and time commitment. You may have more employees to manage, a bigger org chart, more departments, more red tape, more training, more meetings… And this all adds up to more time and headaches for you. It can leave you as the business owner in a hurricane of endless activity and frustration, wondering who’s the boss of who. Is the business running your life, or are you running your business?
What if the things you actually want – a life of more meaning, satisfaction, enjoyment, purpose, and fulfillment – could be achieved by doing just the opposite?
Margo Aaron writes about this idea in a thought-provoking Inc.com article titled Bigger Is Not Always Better: 5 Reasons Your Business Should Stay Small on Purpose. She lays out the advantages you achieve by not hyper-focusing on business growth in the traditional sense, saying,
If you want to build a business around your life and happiness, growth might be the least viable option.Margo Aaron
Behind this article is a book, Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business, by Paul Jarvis. He shares his life learning that keeping his business smaller made it more sustainable, creating more freedom and flexibility for him. Scaling down, rather than up, is what created clarity, freedom from distractions, and a connection to why he was working in the first place.
What We Think
More important than whether you stay small or grow, is how streamlined, profitable, sustainable, and fulfilling your work is.
In this episode of The Money Advantage podcast, we discuss our take.
You’ll find out how to grow a life and business you LOVE, not just one that’s bigger.
Listen to the conversation here:
Where Business Growth Fits into the Cash Flow System
Business growth, however you define it, is just one part of a bigger journey to building time and money freedom. You could have a high-revenue business, but still, be missing key components of creating a sustainable lifetime of wealth.
No matter how big your business grows and how much money you make, if it’s all leaking out between your fingers, you’ll never be free of just working harder and harder to make more money. You’ll never build the peace of mind that comes from having reserves, protection, and assets that work harder for you than you can work for yourself. At some point, the job of earning money is a baton that you need to pass to cash-flowing assets that can keep chugging along, spitting out income the rest of your life so that you can enjoy time freedom.
That’s why we have created the 3-step Business Owner’s Cash Flow System, your roadmap to take you from just surviving, to a life of significance, purpose and financial freedom.
The first step is keeping more of the money you make by fixing money leaks, becoming more efficient and profitable. Then, you’ll protect your money with insurance and legal protection, and Privatized Banking. Finally, you’ll put your money to work, increase your income with cash-flowing assets.
Business growth connects to the roadmap in two places.
First, the way you think about your business, life, and money is part of your Entrepreneurial Mindset in Stage 1.
Secondly, building a business that’s a good investment for you –– that’s part of Investing in Stage 3. To go from business’s slave to its master, you need the right goals, processes, and systems so that it becomes self-sustaining. Then it can become an asset that’s producing cash flow independent of the...
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