Achieving Success (And Balance) As An Entrepreneur

The following is an edited excerpt from the book, The 10-Minute Business Owner, by Mark Evans DM.

“How the hell did I get here?”

That’s what I ask myself as I sit comfortably on a beach chair, basking under the warm sunshine on the white, sandy beaches of an exclusive Caribbean island while the captain and crew of the yacht are in the distance preparing lunch for my family. As we wait, there’s a fine local beer in my hand and an even finer cigar in my mouth.

I’m a long way from my days as a micromanaging business owner in Columbus, Ohio, where I foolishly tended to every issue, large or small, from unresponsive sales leads to particularly nasty paper jams in the copy machine. This tropical island paradise is an even longer way from the trailer park of the small town I grew up in. Of course, in the middle of all that were two separate occasions when I nearly went bankrupt. So yes, this is good, but it’s been a long and winding road to get here.

I’ve gone from barely graduating high school to making more money than I ever dreamed possible while traveling the world. Life is good, and it keeps getting better. Today, I’m on top of the world, running two successful, global businesses — a massive real estate investment firm and a lucrative media company — that generate millions of dollars each per year. Sure, the money is nice, but I also get to run my operation from anywhere in the world, which provides me with two other riches life has to offer: time and freedom!

So how did I get here? Keep reading and you’ll find out.

Not every day is like today, when I get to sit beachside reflecting on my past, present, and future, with my lovely wife at my side and my son Mark III playing in crystal clear waters.

In fact, although my micromanaging days as a business owner were more than twelve years ago, they’re still fresh in my mind. As a young entrepreneur, I knew I had to hustle back then by working harder and longer than everyone else. Maybe you feel the same way, but everybody needs to work hard in the beginning. There comes a point, however, when you just don’t have to do everything on your own anymore. In fact, there comes a point when you’re losing money if you try to. The key is to know when you can start letting go.

Some days, I’m still in all-day conferences, but the God’s honest truth is that on most days, I spend a total of about ten minutes in each of my businesses and continue to create multi-million-dollar returns.

I can hear you calling, “BS!” loud and clear from thousands of miles away, but it’s true. It didn’t happen overnight, and I had to work very hard to get here, but I did get here. Now, I’d like to share my story with you so that maybe it will help you to find your own way through the trials and tribulations of a micromanaging business owner to real freedom. I don’t know everything, but I know what worked for me, and I know it can work for you too.

With the lessons I’ve learned about sustainable growth and how to let go of routine tasks — among other things — I’m confident that I can shave years off the learning curve for anyone who is willing to dive deep and do the work.

A Pivotal Moment, And A Plan

On October 8th, 2005, my grandmother died, which was a key point in my life because we had a great relationship, and she had a big impact on my life. This caused me to do some deep internal thinking about who I was and where I was going in life.

I wasn’t making a lot of money at the time compared to what I make today, but I was still financially comfortable. Time, however, was a big problem because I didn’t have enough of it, so I asked myself some important questions.

Why bother being in business at all if I’m going to be running around like a maniac chasing everything down on my own, just to maintain a comfortable status quo? What’s the point of working so hard if I don’t have any time to enjoy it?

A few months later, my wife (girlfriend at the time), Deena and I were in my office late one night. I was used to starting work at 4:00 a.m. and leaving at 11:00 p.m. because I thought I loved it, and let’s be honest, I never felt like I had enough time in the day. As business owners, we feel like our work is never done, right? That fateful night, however, I stayed even later, and Deena joined me because she wanted to spend some time with me, which was hard to come by because I worked so much. But that night, I wasn’t doing much work.

I was still hurting from my grandmother’s recent passing, so I was doing some deep soul-searching instead, thinking about how short life really is. It made me realize I was tired of working such ludicrous hours every day, overanalyzing every tedious task of business minutiae that landed on my desk. There were other things I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to do some traveling and spend more time with my family and friends.

Finally, I said, “Enough is enough.”

Deena understood where my mental state was at, and that night, we devised a plan for me to start letting go of some of the insanely overwhelming administrative tasks related to my business. “Let’s get the hell out of Columbus for a while to unwind,” she suggested. At first, I wondered how the hell she thought I was going to be able to do that because I had so much work to do, but rather quickly, I realized the idea wasn’t so crazy. In fact, it was exactly what I needed to do. With that in mind, I somewhat painfully decided to put the day-to-day operations of my business in the capable hands of my team in Ohio while Deena and I took off for a month to South Beach, Florida.

Letting Go (And What Followed)

With a semi-devised plan in place to let go of my micromanaging nature, we embarked on a journey that ended up changing everything for me. I put all the administrative tasks and routine aspects of operating my business in the hands of my team.

“So, what happened?” you ask.

Did my office burst into flames the first time the phone rang with a critical situation that I was unavailable to tend to in person? Was the lunch hour replaced with happy hour, featuring ninety-nine-cent cocktails and ten-cent wings? Did my team start looting the office like it was some sort of post-apocalyptic free-for-all?

Nope, none of those things happened. What did happen was that my team became empowered to do things on their own, which actually led to far more efficient daily operations. Now, I would be lying to you if I said things went smooth as silk, but I can tell you that most of what went wrong wasn’t catastrophic by any means. Could I get on the phone and close a deal better than anyone in the office? Yes. Chances are, you can sell your product better than anyone else as well, but there is no scale in that.

Meanwhile, my time was freed up tremendously. I enjoyed a level of freedom I never had before. I didn’t have to spend so much time thinking about the small details of my work. It was also an opportunity to commit some time to create a vision and think bigger about my business. The simple act of letting go opened the door to eventually expand my business to a level that would have never been possible otherwise.

It wasn’t easy at first. In fact, I definitely experienced some nasty withdrawal symptoms during the initial transition period. I had anxiety so severe that it led to full-scale panic attacks with sleepless nights, chest pain, and dry heaving. Eventually, however, as things fell into place, it all became worth it and then some.

One more thing happened. Things went so well that our one-month trip to Florida turned into a brand-new lifestyle. Once we realized that I could run my business from anywhere, we toured the world. Over the next two and a half years, I virtualized my entire business, and the industry soon followed suit.

Traveling forced me to let go of my tendency to be a control-freak business owner. I wholeheartedly recommend it as an impetus for your own trial run of letting go. Find the one or two things you’re truly great at as an entrepreneur and hire good people to take care of the rest.

The Key: Work On Your Business, Not In It

Ask yourself, are you the visionary and the implementer? If so, stop and hire some people who implement much more effectively/consistently than you can. Once you do that, you’ll discover there is a big difference between working on a business and working in a business.

Working in your business means you’re in the office or in the field for way too many hours every day, micromanaging every aspect of it. Conversely, working on your business means something much less routine. You could be anywhere in the world planning the next big deal you’re going to make. Maybe you’ll be thinking about a new hire to grow the company, working on KPIs to know what is working and what isn’t, or planning the next acquisition for growth. Or you could be working on your overall vision to continue growing the company. That’s where you want to be — working on the business, not in it.

Not every business day will involve a mere ten minutes of work from an exotic island locale, but you can definitely work a lot less and make much more from anywhere in the world. After all, the internet has made virtual business much easier, and I wholeheartedly endorse using it to your advantage.

If this book gets you from working twelve hours in the office every day down to four, or ten down to three, that is a major victory to me! Someday you might even get it down to an hour or two, then a half-hour, and eventually ten minutes. Who knows? Maybe soon, you and I will share a beer and a cigar together while talking business on the sandy beaches of a tropical island resort and watching our kids play in the water. If I can do this, I bet you can too.

You might be thinking that I’m asking you to run away from your business. That would be foolish, and it’s not something I would ever recommend. Instead, I’m telling you to work on freeing up mind time to work on the business (not in it) and grow it.

For more on achieving success, wealth, and freedom, check out The 10-Minute Business Owner by Mark Evans DM.