If your business saps your energy, time, and motivation, then you don’t own a company. Your company owns you. To explain what’s happening, let me introduce you to a powerful framework for understanding the phases of business growth. It’s called the Five Steps to Freedom, and this is the roadmap we use to help our clients build a true business asset—a company that continues to progress and produce profits even without your day-to-day involvement.
While these steps show a linear progression, it’s normal for businesses to move back and forth between stages as they grow. You see, every business, regardless of industry, must go through five basic steps of organizational “growing pains” before it can become a hands-off, revenue-producing asset that you don’t have to worry about. The faster you can confront and defeat the challenges common to each step, the faster you’ll be truly “free”—from both a time and money perspective. In this video, I explain each of these five steps.
The reality is that what most people learn in business is that we start a business, and getting through these five steps takes a lot longer than we think because most people who start businesses are technicians. We’re good at baking cakes, building houses, manufacturing widgets, and doing whatever, and you can be doing a business based on what you’re good at. But learning how to be a great business owner can take a little longer than most people expect.
