Starting a Business — The “Control Over Time” Goal
“Control Over Time” is often a key reason why people decide to start their own business. I will cover a couple of others over the next few stories, but as discussed in my previous story on Personal & Business Goals, the key reasons behind starting your business are critical to its long-term success. It is imperative to recognise that those reasons form your personal goals for your business, and if you do not work to achieve them, you can feel as trapped in your company as you did working in someone else’s.
The Problem
“Control Over Time” may be the single most frequently quoted reason for starting your own business — sick of the 9–5, the commute, the expectation of working late and the loss of time with family & friends.
It may also be the single most frequently botched goal as well.
The “botching” of this goal stems from a couple of key sources, one that is inherent in starting up a business & one that is completely external. It is the latter that we will consider first:
There is a strongly-rooted idea in modern entrepreneurship that suggests that success only comes from “hustling” 25 hours a day, 8 days a week in your business. There are a wide variety of entrepreneurship “commentators” who espouse this attitude & it has created the view that without such superhuman efforts, nothing can be achieved.
The difficulty in controlling time that is inherent with starting a business is about the number of “hats” you have to wear as the first person in. Regardless of scale, your business still needs a sales team, an account management team, a finance team, a development team and so forth — and as the first person in, you are each and every one of those teams.
And because of all of the roles you are trying to fill, you get caught in the trap of thinking that you need to work more hours to get “everything” done.
So with the external pressure of perceived entrepreneurial wisdom & all the tasks you feel like you need to do, you suddenly find that your personal goal of controlling your time has been completely lost.
The Immediate Solution
First & foremost, let’s dispel the erroneous concept of “hustling” — even if you’re only at the outset of your business journey, this term will likely be familiar to you. This is one of the most pervasive & poisonous ideas that has seeped into the entrepreneurial mindset. It leaves any new business owner feeling like they can never give enough, never work hard enough, never really give themselves a chance of success.
And it is a lie!
To generate long-term success, establishing the right balance between work & home is essential for a multitude of reasons, but here are a few key ones:
- You cannot keep up 16-hour workdays forever
- The initial support you received from friends & family will dwindle as they see what that workload does to you
- Rome was not built in a day & nor was it built by one person
The Long-term Solutions
The long-term solutions to achieving a “Control Over Time” goal are significantly more detailed, but accepting that the five facts below are facts, you will be off to a good start & we will look at each of them in turn:
- Running a business is not like working in a business
- Inputs do not always equal outputs
- You will get work guilt
- If you want to do everything yourself, be a freelancer, not a business owner
- Specialists require less time to do their tasks than generalist
Running a business is not like working in a business
For anyone who has run their own business, this in an immutable fact. And it doesn’t matter if the business you are setting up is going to be doing the same work as you did as a salaried employee. You are no longer a baker, a web developer or a landscape gardener — you are a business owner. And a business owner makes the rules.
In the context of the “Control Over Time” goal, you must first challenge one of the key constraints of the salaried employee — the fixed & enforced concept of “working hours”. You used to work certain hours because that is what your employer dictated. You no longer have an employer, and therefore the hours you choose to work are completely up to you.
Remembering that the 9–5, 8-hour day, Mon-Fri working week is not natural law, but in fact a completely human construct will be essential to achieving your “Control Over Time” goal.
Inputs do not always equal outputs
In your standard salaried hours, how many hours do you honestly believe that you are productive? And how many of them do you spend trying to look productive to satisfy your employer’s desire to see you working for a set number of hours?
In the modern world, we all too often equate the phrase You get out what you put in to mean that the more time we spend working, the more we will get out. Put that sort of thinking in a box & sink it to the bottom of your nearest body of water.
Businesses thrive because they get the maximum outputs from the minimum of inputs and therefore the real value of time in business is to achieve what is required with the least effort possible. So if you want to succeed with a “Control Over Time” goal, only work when you can produce outputs & if there are no outputs to be gained, take a break.
You will get work guilt
Work guilt is the feeling that you are not doing enough to grow, expand or develop your business. But as soon as you give in to that guilt, you will transgress on #2 above — you will focus on inputs, and not on outputs.
Work guilt will likely be a whole new feeling to you if this is your first business, as it rarely affects salaried employees in quite the same way. And as a business owner, you just have to accept that there will be times when you feel like this. No matter the size or scale of the business you create, this feeling will strike you, particularly when you are already a little down, often when your commercial performance is lagging behind your expectations.
And when work guilt does strike, do not work more — instead, take the time to work out the single thing you could achieve today that would help your business the most. Prioritise it above all else & at the end of the day you will feel much better for achieving that than you will have for working until the wee hours on the minutiae.
If you want to do everything yourself, be a freelancer, not a business owner
This fact is looking slightly further ahead perhaps for some, but in the context of a “Control Over Time” goal, it is a critical attitude to have longer-term.
Whilst on Day 1 you may need to perform all of the roles your business requires, this is will not result in you exercising more control over your own time. And therefore you need to think hard about whether you really want to do everything yourself. Assuming that you’ve been honest with yourself about your desire to control your own time, I’m going to assume that you don’t want to do everything yourself.
Relinquishing control over aspects of your business will be incredibly difficult at first, so start small. Outsourcing of your accountancy responsibilities is often the first step as it requires a specialist skillset, but have a think about other tasks that could be done by someone else. These could be some of the more administrative elements of your business for example, but whatever they are, if you can afford give them to someone else, do it.
As a business grows, the number of tasks grow too & therefore the risk to your “Control Over Time” goal increases. So by starting small & early with outsourcing, you will develop a comfort with it that will become critical to your future success for your goal.
Specialists require less time to do their tasks than generalists
Building on the above in a little more detail, a growing business must recognise the importance of specialists over generalists. As a business owner with no staff or outsourced resource, you are effectively a generalist in most areas — i.e. the roles you have to take on outside of your own core skillset.
As such, the time those tasks take you to do as a generalist will be significantly longer than if you hired, or outsourced to, a specialist.
So going back to our earlier point about the importance of outputs over inputs, the more specialist your team is, the less total time is required to achieve the same level of outputs. And because they are specialists, they will require significantly less input from you as the business owner to achieve their tasks, allowing you greater latitude in your “Control Over Time” goal.
Achieving a “Control Over Time” goal is not easy, and many business owners fail. But the majority that do fail do so because they start their business with this “hustling” attitude and then can never break free from it.
So if controlling your own time is one of the central reasons for starting your own business, take action to make sure you achieve it. And when you do, you will experience a freedom unlike anything a salaried role could ever provide.
