As a business owner, do you ever feel like a prisoner to your business?  A prisoner to your employees and customers?  Do you sometimes feel like you work a demanding job instead of owning a thriving business?  If so, you are not alone.

As your virtual Growth Coach, allow me to ask you some additional tough but revealing coaching questions:

• As a business owner, could you leave your business today for one or two months and come back to find it operating smoothly and profitably?
• Could you even escape for two weeks?
• Have you ever had a work-free, guilt-free vacation with no work calls, emails or paperwork?
• God forbid, if you got seriously sick or disabled, would your business survive?
• When physically away from the business, can you be mentally away from the business?
• Are you free from having everything flow through you (transactions, decisions, problems, etc.)?

If your answers were mostly “no”, odds are you don’t have a successful and self-sustaining business, but rather a glorified job in which you are trapped!  Odds are you don’t have an effective business system; YOU by default are the business system!  In a large sense, you are a prisoner of your success and trying to do too much on your own … being the Chief EVERYTHING Officer.  That is an exhausting way to run a business.  

No matter what industry you are in, you should not be a prisoner to your business!  If you are, you have it backwards. Your business should serve you and your dreams.  It should give you greater freedom, not less.  In fact, your business, properly designed, should function practically without you, not because of you.  It should run predictably and automatically whether you are in the office or not, in the store or not, out in the field or not, on vacation or not.  Your business should not depend upon your presence, personality, problem solving and perspiration for its daily operations and survival. If so, your business does not work, you do!

Please don’t be offended by these frank business coaching observations and comments.  Such honesty and insights come from The Growth Coach franchise system serving several thousand small business clients each and every year.  Please understand, at the Growth Coach franchise, all of our certified business coaches throughout North America deeply admire, respect and love serving and helping business owners, their managers, and self-employed professionals.  However, we are paid to share the truth and get clients to make changes and get results … that requires some tough-love coaching.

As such, we earn our coaching fees by helping our clients to “face reality” and “deal with the truth” …  the good, bad and ugly.  That is the only way our small business clients will improve and advance.  After we help them define their ideal future and goals and create focused action plans to get there, we then provide on-going accountability to keep them on track. This tough-love business coaching and accountability process is critical to help entrepreneurs achieve greater success, balance, freedom and fun.

Here comes some more real world business coaching.  Bottom line, you should run your business; it should not run you, your family or your life.  Your business should work harder so you don’t have to.  It should be systems-dependent and not owner-dependent or even expert-dependent for its success.  Your systems should be consistently directing your employees on what to do and how to do it.  Your business should have its own heart, mind, and soul … it should not steal your vital organs and spirit!

Stop for a moment and think of the consequences.  If everything in your business flows through you and is dependent upon you, then you are dramatically restricting the growth and profits of your company.  As a single human being, there are natural limits to the amount of work, transactions, problems, and decisions that can flow effectively through you in a given day.  Stop being a bottleneck or clog.  Otherwise, you will continue to restrict the development of your employees and business and ensure your persistent exhaustion.  Stop missing out on greater personal freedom, money and happiness.

Let me be very clear, you are the expert in your business and industry. We at The Growth Coach are not and will never claim to be.  Our expertise is helping business owners to unlock greater potential in themselves and their businesses.  To get them to work “on” themselves, “on” their businesses, and “on” their lives.  To guide them through a proven and powerful coaching process to help them discover for themselves what they want to change and what solutions are best for them.  Here are some resources to help you stop feeling like a prisoner to your business:

• Click here for more information about our guaranteed business coaching services.
• Click here to Locate a Business Coach near you.
• Click here to take a simple, confidential business coaching assessment to reveal your opportunities and challenges.
• Click here to read our popular business coaching book, “Becoming a Strategic Business Owner”.