In parts 1, 2 and 3 we’ve been talking about how to grow your business so that you can get the profits you need to escape the rat race.
There are really two critical points that you need to decide upon before you grow your business.
- Do you grow by focusing on making your existing customers more profitable? Or do you just add more? In 95% of cases it is going to be extracting more value from your existing customers
- Do you achieve this growth manually or do you build a ‘machine’ to do it for you?
The real challenge of growing through manual labour is that you need to pay for the labour. So do you have the man power floating around in order to do the work you need done to grow to your desired level?
Then there is the second problem: it is getting harder and harder to find good people. But alas they’ve been saying that since Adam was a boy. So it may be getting harder, it may not – the only thing we can be certain of is that good people are a very scarce resource.
The third problem with people is because slavery is outlawed, good people can come and go as they please. So just because you have a couple of ‘gun’ staffers working for you doesn’t mean that they will always work for you.
Sadly they are not an asset you can own!
That means when the day comes to sell your business you can’t very well sell it for more because you have a couple of really good staff members on books…
Yeah, I know it’s not fair!
Which means that if you want to have genuine wealth, then you need systems that operate independently of the people in your business in order to generate your wealth. And there is another good reason to not be reliant on people with your business…