[Free Book Preview #7] ~ RIGHT BUSINESS RIGHT LIFE™ – From Fed-up Employee to Freed-up Entrepreneur

[Free Book Preview #7] ~ RIGHT BUSINESS RIGHT LIFE™ – From Fed-up Employee to Freed-up Entrepreneur

Hey there, Freedom Seeker!

Welcome to the exhilarating big sky of small business entrepreneurship!

I wrote a book for you. This book reveals the Unbiased Small Business Research Formula developed from decades in the trenches of American Main Street and online business as a small business entrepreneur and a coach. Its objective is to help you become the successful creator of the new life you envision by objectively guiding you in researching and choosing the right business.

In the next weeks, I’ll share free sections of the book with you before it’s released for publication and available for purchase.

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CHAPTER 5 – Where You Discover The One Secret to Success and Happiness as a Business Owner

“If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.- Khalil Gibran

The Right Business Right Life’s secret to success as a small business owner is deceivingly simple: Choosing the business that is in ALIGNMENT with who you are and the life you dream of is the 20% effort that results in 80% of your success in business and in life. 

It is worth repeating. The right business for the right life is all about ALIGNMENT. The research you exercise in this book to identify the right business for you is 20% of efforts that deliver 80% of the results in long-term success and happiness with your business.

Running a business is challenging enough; why not stack the odds in your favor? The closer to your best-suited business, the easier and faster your success will be, and the more fulfilled you will be.

Your life’s most important priorities, your strengths, and your life purpose are key conditions to monetary success and living a meaningful life. How well-aligned you want your business to be with each of these requirements is entirely up to you. It is your business and your life. 

Below is a graph to visualize the alignment mechanism between you and your business.

Three key characteristics give us a good idea of whether a business is a good match for a future owner and vice versa. The business they choose is at the intersection of the following:

1. Their purpose and values.
2. Their ideal life, as they envision it, is titled LIFE+ in our methodology. 
3. Their strengths as future leaders of a particular business.

1- Your Values and Life Purpose:  “The purpose of life is a life of purpose.” – Robert Byrne

 First, let’s clarify what exactly is a life purpose.  A business that actualizes your life purpose results in a business for which you spring out of bed in the morning to run it, to grow it, to create for it. A purpose is not the same as a passion for a hobby or an activity. Passion is what we do for ourselves because we enjoy what it does for us, like hiking, running, yoga, art, surfing, knitting, golfing, etc. On the other hand, our purpose is what we do for others and why we do what we do. Our purpose is how we make an impact. It is what makes us face adversity and obstacles with persistence and faith. If “purpose” were an emotion, we could call it “true love.” True love is long-lasting, giving, forgiving, and resilient. Passion alone isn’t. I am fortunate to have discovered not just my purpose but also the vehicle to actualize it, my business. It makes my life meaningful. It helps me be more resilient to whatever challenges come my way. I also know how miserable one feels when our business doesn’t fulfill our purpose. Should you decide to start any business, I wish you the good fortune of picking a business that can be the HOW to your WHY. Starting a business by following your life purpose is not absolutely required to be successful. However, it adds a tremendous dimension to a life well-lived. 

So, how do you align your ideal business with your life purpose? There are two steps to aligning your life purpose with a business. First, you need to determine what your life purpose is. Next is to find and fix a problem related to your purpose with a business that offers the solution. Reach out if you are not sure what it is your life purpose. We can help you walk through exercises and assessments that will reveal your life purpose to you and align it with a business.

a- Uncovering your life purpose requires an assessment:

• History of significant life events that defined you.
• Your high values.
• Your genius zone: what you can do well and comes naturally.
• What inspires you? What is your muse? 

b- Once you identify your life purpose, the next step is to identify the business that can be the instrument to actualize your life purpose: 

• Identify a problem, an annoyance, or an inconvenience that screams to be resolved for that purpose.
• Research a solution to fix that problem. 
• Create a business model to deliver the solution.

2- Aligning a business with your life priorities.

This a simple yet often overlooked effect of business ownership. A business you own can be a vehicle for a life that makes sense for you. We use five practical characteristics of a satisfying life that a business can deliver for you. It makes the acronym: LIFE+. LIFE+ stands for Lifestyle, Income, Flexibility, Equity, + your key milestones. Brainstorming on what exactly each means to you guides you in identifying your ideal business and then verifying that it can deliver the life that fits you.

It doesn’t include all that make-up happiness, of course. For example, it won’t help you determine who you are going to love and share your life with or the friendship you will nurture. However, it can allow you to prioritize your time based on who and matter matters the most to you. It addresses the five key elements of a gratifying life that a business can deliver.

The second step of the internal research of the RBRL formula is to identify your LIFE+. In the following chapters, we will expand in detail each step of the LIFE+ you envision.

• Lifestyle: How do you want to spend your time: when you want to work and when you want to be on vacation?
• Income: How much money do you want to make now and later?
• Flexibility: What is your ideal location(s) from where you want to live and work?
• Equity: How much equity, if any, do you wish to build in your business and contribute to your wealth?
• + Your milestones: What are the noteworthy accomplishments and experiences you want to tick off your bucket list and have no regrets twenty years from now?

If you play your cards well, each of these priorities will be enabled by your business over ten years or more. Once you have clarity on your priorities, we will create a decision matrix by giving weight to these objectives and quantifying how well-aligned they are with the businesses you are considering. 

3- Leveraging strengths with a business to succeed better and faster.

Even though we understand that aligning our strengths with any career is critical to our professional success, it is not uncommon for folks to pick a career or job for other reasons: family influence, social status, convenience, the promise of money, easier success, etc. The same goes for business ownership. After all, it is a career too. As we discussed in the previous chapters, compared to getting a job, entrepreneurship has a relatively low barrier to entry, possibly causing a higher rate of failure than if one picked the wrong career. When you become an entrepreneur, particularly a small business entrepreneur – without outside investors that evaluate you as well as your brilliant idea- you need to be both your own uncompromising interviewer deciding if they should “hire” you and the interviewee exploring the pros and cons of the job. The goal is to determine if the role you are about to take on is a good fit for who you are today.  In a venture capital-funded startup or a partnership, financiers will go to great lengths to confirm you are capable of success, their money is relatively safe, and the potential return on investment is enticing. As a sole investor, you are the only judge. Three types of strengths comprise your career capital when considering your entrepreneurial journey: your technical knowledge, your business skills, and your strengths in social behavior. Your career capital is the compilation of all your experiences, whether within the context of a job or through roles you assumed unofficially. 

• Core competencies: Through education, training, and experiences, you’ve acquired various technical skills or core competencies. The best way to identify your competencies is to chronologically list all the roles you have assumed, even as a child or young adult, and to consider which activities have contributed to your career capital. Some of these skills you enjoyed learning, and others you learned how much you disliked them. They all give you clues to determining which are worth exploiting or avoiding as a business owner.  In the context of running a business, examples of technical skills might be programming, cutting hair, fixing cars,  teaching yoga, cooking, and playing golf. Business skills as they relate to running a business can be leading, hiring, managing people, presenting, teaching, networking, strategy, etc. Skills such as bookkeeping and marketing are also technical skills if you run a bookkeeping business or a marketing agency. 

• Social Behavior: Strengths in social behavior are not as easily detected. I thought I intuitively knew what my social behavior strengths and weaknesses were. Yet, it was only when I took a psychometric assessment and worked with a coach, confirming or discovering what I had guessed about myself, that I was able to understand why I failed in some areas and succeeded in others. The most important social behavior when you own a business is your leadership style, even if yours is a solo business with no employees. There are multiple styles of leadership. The traditionally perceived type A personality as a more successful leader has been debunked by many studies. Other behavioral strengths to consider are your analytical, communication, social influence, strategic, and affinity for or aversion to change. You don’t need to excel in all of these areas. The key is to know which of your strengths your business will require and what you should outsource or delegate to others. Once you understand your own behavior strengths, you can then evaluate the strengths of others and hire the right people for the roles you need them to fill. A great leader is a self-aware leader who surrounds herself with people who excel in areas the business needs. It is a great way to build an effective team. I wish I had understood this when I managed a team of 40 employees. The costliest mistakes I made in business were to hire people based on their résumé and not their behavioral strengths. Many had pursued education and career that, instead of developing their strengths, required them to compensate for their weaknesses which led to their job dissatisfaction, poor results, and headaches for me and other employers. 
• Business skills and learning?  No doubt, business ownership requires stepping outside of our comfort zone to grow our business and ourselves. However, assessing what we need to add to our repertoire of skills and how much time it will take us to get there is critical. When you are considering getting into a business for yourself, the objective is to minimize the length of time that it will take to get to the breakeven point and profit. The early stage of growth in any business is a particularly vulnerable stage. There is a lot to prove at that point. As soon as you invest in your business, should you create or acquire one, you will need to keep the lights on in your business and your life with recurring costs – costs of goods sold and operating costs that include paying yourself during ramp-up. The danger of picking a business that requires you to step way out of your knowledge is not that you are incapable of learning the new skill needed. The danger is that it might take too long for you to become good enough to lead the business to profits before you get to profits.  According to the Small Business Administration, 29% of the businesses that fail, fail because they run out of money. A reason many owners I interviewed ran out of money was that they took too long to be effective in their roles. They could have shortened their learning curve by seeking help from advisors, coaches, and teachers instead of trial and error and figuring it out on their own. 
• In business, time is more finite than money. In short, pick your battles carefully. If you decide to pick a business that has many attributes you love but that is not a great match to your current excellence in skills and knowledge, don’t hesitate to outsource, hire advisors, and, or engage coaches to speed up your results. It is more cost-effective than taking too many months and years to figure it out on your own. Aligning a business with your strengths while outsourcing your blindspots yields faster success. Then to speed up the results, get help.

Your journey to small business success begins with the most seamless alignment between who you are and the business you select. It’s essential to take a deep dive into understanding your life purpose, your vision of an ideal life, and your strengths before committing to establish or acquire any business. The research phase of the Right Business Right Life (RBRL) Formula prepares you to avoid the traps and biases of the Small to Midsize Business (SMB) market, thus laying a solid foundation for your success. With RBRL, you’ll prepare your navigation plan as a business owner. This research phase is the time when we define the destination and fit the captain’s skills to the right vessel for our life journey ahead.

Key Chapter Takeaways:

The low-hanging fruit to succeed in business begins with the most perfect alignment between you and the business you pick. The RBRL formula prepares you to overcome the market flaw and common traps of business ownership and makes your ascent to success easier and faster.

• If you have identified a life purpose you are passionate about, you already have an advantage! Starting a business that actualizes your life purpose is a powerful accelerator to success. Your life purpose doesn’t need to change the world; it simply needs to fire you up above and beyond the money you’ll make.
• Your definition of your extraordinary life: We each have our definition of an ideal life. Not only that, what’s important to you today, might not be as critical in a few years. Decide how you want to live in order to pick the business that can facilitate that life.
• Leverage your strengths. First, you need to gain clarity of your strengths and genius zone so that you can transfer them to the right business. These strengths might be skills, social behavior, and establishing a balance between what you should learn as a new owner and what you should outsource or delegate to speed up your success and profitability point.

TAKE THIS SELF-TEST: Am I prepared to research and find the business that is aligned with who I am and the life I want?

Rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 5 based on how accurate the statements are for you. 1 means not accurate at all, and 5 means most accurate.

1. I am open to exploring various business ideas and industries that I may not have considered before ________ points.
2. I am willing to invest time and effort in conducting thorough research before making a decision ________ points.
3. I understand that finding the right business involves a balance between my passions and market demand________ points.
4. I am ready to objectively assess my strengths, weaknesses, and skills that can contribute to the success of a business________ points.
5. I am willing to seek guidance from mentors, advisors, or experts in the field to gain insights and perspectives________ points.
6. I am financially prepared to invest in the research phase and the potential startup costs of the business________ points.
7. I am committed to creating a business that aligns with my desired lifestyle and allows me the flexibility and freedom I seek________ points.
8. I am prepared to learn from failures and setbacks as part of the research process and entrepreneurial journey________ points.

Total your scores and use the answer key below to determine your readiness: Total __________points.

8 to 15 points: You may have some reservations or concerns about the research process and finding the right business. Consider further exploring your motivations and conducting additional research to gain more confidence in your approach.

16 to 24 points: You have a moderate level of preparedness and openness to the research process. Continue building your knowledge and skills, seek guidance where needed, and approach the research phase with a proactive mindset.

25 to 32 points: Congratulations! You have a strong readiness to research and find the business that aligns with who you are and the life you want. Leverage your enthusiasm and commitment to embark on a thorough research journey that will increase your chances of picking the right business opportunity.

Remember, this self-test is just a starting point to gauge your mindset and readiness. The journey of finding the perfect business requires ongoing learning, adaptability, and a willingness to explore new possibilities. Good luck on your entrepreneurial path!

Joining the VIP Waitlist

Would you like early access to your copy of the book as soon as it is released and receive a bonus book companion coaching session?

During the private coaching session, I’ll guide you through the exercises and templates in the book. Available to the first 20 VIPs who purchase the book. To join the VIP waitlist, click here.