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Untangling the knot: the investor mindset shift
How should a business owner think? One set of answers might take you down a motivational pathway, evoking notions of positivity, ambition, boldness, strength and resilience. Another might focus more on strategic thinking or put financial considerations first.
These different approaches are all valid, of course, but they risk missing one vital element: clarity.
This isn’t to say that many business owners have some sort of vision of what success looks like to them, or how they want their business to function, day by day. However, too often their personal goals become entangled with running the business. What they’re then stuck with is a tightening knot of problems and issues arising from both business and personal circumstances.
Untangling this knot requires a shift of mindset, from owner to investor. This is a process that brings with it the clarity required to grow a healthy enterprise.
Accept there are problems
Many of us go through life knowing that certain things aren’t working for us how they should but, like a nagging pain, we learn to put up with them.
The first thing to do is to face up to the fact that there are problems, and, despite their complexity, acknowledging they exist. This is a crucial starting point for bringing about change.
Acknowledging the problems should come before goal setting and it should also be something you don’t keep to yourself. Let those closest to you know you’re embarking on this process.
Why is this disclosure important? The root of many business problems is their entanglement with family life and personal relationships. By being transparent, you set the tone for communication while taking the first, critical step to untangling the knot.
I cannot over-emphasise the importance of this openness. To be understood by others, you must strive to understand them.
Define your personal and business goals
To gain clarity, you must define your goals. This isn’t the same as setting them. First, you should ask yourself what sort of thing you see as a goal. It doesn’t have to be a conventional goal such as increasing sales or turnover or even growing the business. It could be something as basic as taking an overseas holiday or ensuring you don’t miss your children’s weekend sports activities.
These personal goals are part of how you perceive your business and the extent to which it overlaps with your daily life and personal relationships. Is the business stable enough to run without you while you’re away?
Business owners can feel paralysed when searching for the “big why” type of goal-setting questions, the existential issues. Focus instead on what feels more real, and achievable, to you.
Overcome your guilty feelings
It’s normal for a business owner to identify strongly with their business, sometimes to the extent that they can’t separate themselves from it, finding it difficult to take time off.
Being able to step back comfortably is critical for gaining clarity but it can be challenging for business owners so heavily personally invested in their businesses.
It’s a challenge you must meet to adopt an investor mindset.
Begin system building
System building is about ensuring a business can run properly without its owner’s involvement. This requires a depersonalisation of the business structure.
Think of all the tasks you carry out or oversee personally and what you would need to put in place to make them operate without you. The aim here is to introduce greater stability by reducing the reliance on your personal involvement. By creating this standalone structure, you put functionality and scalability before personality.
Having the confidence to delegate responsibility and tasks is an essential part of system building. It makes sense then, that the first business roles you should outsource should be the ones responsible for the tasks you least enjoy doing.
Delegation should also help you abandon the urge to constantly prove yourself by taking on more direct responsibility for diverse tasks. You’re not a one-man band.
Adopt an investor mindset
Once you instil a greater degree of objectivity in your business, you can start to adopt an investor mindset.
How does an investor’s thinking differ?
With an investor mindset, you see your business as primarily an asset. This follows from taking a step back, taking your personality out of the equation, building systems and delegating responsibilities.
The investor mindset is concerned with creating long-term value to achieve financial returns. This doesn’t prevent you from working in the business, but it does require a shift in perspective.
Whereas an entrepreneurial mindset favours creativity and risk-taking, the investor mindset prioritises stability and reliability to deliver growth and profits. It’s a necessary progression where you channel initial energy involved in creating something of value into maintaining that value and expanding the business’s potential.
Remember what it is you want
Achieving greater objectivity around your business shouldn’t prevent you from knowing what you want out of it personally. Basically, when you depersonalise your business, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Your personal goals and how your business success can help your loved ones should still be major factors.
Be honest with yourself. Give yourself permission to want what you want in return for the hard work you’re putting in.
It won’t always be easy to untangle the knot of personal needs and business commitments, but it will be worth it.
Are you ready to shift to an investor mindset? Is your business ready?
Contact me today for more details about how I can help you.
“This is a family business.” You see this a lot on company websites and in their publicity. They see it as a fundamental virtue, conjuring up images of a tight-knit unit built on the kind of intimate trust you couldn’t necessarily take for granted outside your blood relations.
To a greater or lesser extent, this may be true. It depends on individual factors. One definition of a family business is:
A commercial organisation in which management decisions are made or influenced by multiple generations of a family.
Generally, you think of a family business as having various family members officially involved or employed in it. But really, every business is a family business, because the family of the founder or owner is affected by the running of the business.
Business pressures are the cause of stresses and strains in family life. Over half of business owners have experienced poor mental health, working long hours and facing financial worries. Inevitably, this can impact their lives at home and therefore the lives of their loved ones.
Consequently, regardless of whether an enterprise is officially set up as a family business, the family is still a highly significant factor.
The hidden struggle
A problem shared is a problem halved — it’s a glib saying and a cliché but, like most clichés, it contains a kernel of truth.
When business owners and founders fail to share their worries, they seal up the safety valve. The pressure builds. And even though they may think they’re hiding their struggles successfully, the people around them can sense that something’s wrong.
This creates tension. The tension builds. Something must give…
How do you depressurise the situation?
Let’s think about business values. A great many businesses state that trust is one of their core values — building trust, being trustworthy, creating trusted relationships with their customers etc.
Trust comes from transparency. Or rather, without transparency, you can’t have trust.
So, to depressurise their lives, business owners must be transparent at home. They must trust in the relationships they have to support them.
“But my wife/partner/kids doesn’t/don’t understand the business,” you reply.
It’s not about your loved ones understanding the nuts and bolts. It’s about them feeling invested in your success because they know why you’re doing it: for them.
Reframe your purpose
Consider your why:
• Why did you start this business in the first place?
• Why do you still dedicate so much of your time and energy to it?
• Why do you care about it?
In business, as in life, our values can shift. We change as human beings and the world around us changes too.
You might, for example, not have had a family when you started your business, or had a different lifestyle. Your business might have been your chief focus, and you didn’t have as many other, personal commitments to fulfil.
That initial hunger for success at pretty much any cost often dissipates. Life has a habit of getting in the way of our visions and ideals.
Don’t measure success in terms of how well you stick to your original plan. Measure it instead by how well you adapt your business vision to fit in with your evolving lifestyle. What you want from business and what you want from life form a dynamic relationship: there must be give and take, adaptability and compromise.
Flexibility is a sign of strength.
Reconnect your business with who you are as a person and what your family needs you to provide — reframe your purpose to reflect the value your business should offer as a provider.
The next time you start to think about what will make your business more successful, stop. Pause and take a step back. Then ask yourself:
Is my business’s success linked to what I want to achieve in life and how I provide for my family?
Challenge your perspective
Empathy is a prized quality, but it’s much misunderstood. It’s not some cuddly quality to show you care about someone else’s feelings. True empathy means understanding what it’s like to be that other person, to see things from their perspective.
Typically, it also requires you to challenge your own viewpoint. As a business owner, seeing things from your family’s perspective can be hard — they don’t necessarily see the business’s nuts and bolts, only the emotional impact it has on you and them.
You cannot afford to dismiss this non-business perception of your business. It has real, day-to-day consequences for your family’s wellbeing.
Every business is a family business.
The clarity to connect
The Agnentis approach to business growth is about getting to know you inside out, blending intensive coaching with strategic financial know-how and guidance.
We help you gain the clarity to connect your personal needs to your business growth to support you, your family and your business.
Contact us today for coffee and a chat.
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