Excerpt from The Entrepreneur’s BIG BOOK
Chris Lipper
Inventor | Author | Small Business Coach and Consultant | Sales Trainer | Virtual Business Coach, The Mayor of Lipperville™ / I.V.C., International Virtual Conference™
The
Entrepreneur’s
BIG BOOK
By Chris Lipper
Chapter 2 There is a Solution
Many business owners come to me one of two ways and I had one of each today. They are stuck and unhappy about their business; they don’t like where they’ve ended up and aren’t happy about where they are going. Or they are in the very beginnings of having an idea; they are just getting started and don’t want to make a mistake that will affect them years from now.
First, we need a rudder. I find that most entrepreneurs are somewhat rudderless when they come to me. They tend to go where the business is; they started with an idea or service without really thinking it through all the way to the exit. This is fine in the beginning, but in the end, you’ll end up coming to a guy like me as you’ll find yourself in a business that you no longer love and want to get out of. Your company is no longer what you had envisioned, but you really didn’t have a vision, so let’s get one if you don’t have one now.
What I do is take people through a meditation to the point of exit if they can get there; some can’t. We figure out how old they will be when they will exit, where they will be living, who they are living with, and even what car they are driving. We will of course go to their office mentally and see who’s there and if the staffing is right to support their lifestyle. We will also determine if we have the right people in the right seats to support this stage of the company’s growth and if the business can support the staff, and the staff can support the business. I’ll then start dialing back the image five years at a time, focusing on the organization chart until the current day. We will look at behavior goals, checking in with Chapter 11 in the On The Bus™ WorkBook and a talk I give twice a year in June and December.
Once we know a vision, let’s let others know what the vision is that we are building, and what it is that we are not building, and who we want to work with, and who we don’t. As my mother always said, “A fish rots from the head.” Let’s not be that fish.
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Once we have a vision, we need to figure out behavioral goals to get us there. Document them, track them, and be held accountable to make changes. This is all part of what we do at On The Bus™.
We have our owners fill out monthly Bus Passes; see a basic example here.
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Refer to Step 10 of the 12 Steps of Entrepreneurship later in this chapter. Numbers are all part of having S.M.A.R.T. goals – making goals trackable.
To repeat, you should have a vision as to where you are going. Have a rudder. Figure out when you want to exit the business and work it backwards. For example, I am 58 years old. If I want to work until I am 80, then that gives me about 20 more years, allowing for two years to sell the business. I better get cracking. I’d like to have franchises with an On The Bus™ in each state. This book and my previous book, On The Bus™ WorkBook, will be a big part of that. What are you doing to make your business sellable, franchisable, or are you just going to let it die on the vine? I’ll give you a hint and entrepreneurs hate to hear this: the less of you, the more the company is worth.
“The less of you, the more the company is worth.”
Copyright ©2022, Christopher Scott Lipper. All rights reserved. This work is protected under the copyright laws of the United States and other countries. Unless otherwise noted in the text, all intellectual property, trademarks, inventions, and text contained herein are the property of Christopher Scott Lipper.