This is Barry mold still getting small businesses unstuck. Welcome to the management and leadership portion of this video series. The most important element in growing your business is missed by a lot of entrepreneurs. You need to be able to leverage the work of employees in order to grow your business. If you can't do that, as Carol Roth says, the best selling author of the entrepreneur equation, you only have a job, not a business. You really have not built anything sustainable for yourself.

So let's talk about why you're stuck in this area. Remember, when you dreamed of having your own business, you wanted to take that passion that you had deep inside of you, and do something really great with it. And you're going to be able to make more money as a result. And then you're going to be able to set your own schedule and spend some more time with your family. So how did that work out for you, not quite the way you had planned. That's really because you're stuck.

You've built a job, not a business, you've done in a couple different ways. You try to extract every last dollar from every transaction you have with a customer. In fact, you'll do whatever a customer wants you to do, regardless of what the vision and mission of your company is. You're not focused and you really have no direction. When it comes to money, you never do any long term planning. Whatever is in your bank account, is what you got.

You're also stuck because when you go to hire people, you just want butts in seats. You don't care who you hire. And you still do all the important jobs for yourself. When working with your vendors, you try and negotiate every last nickel again, and of every transaction, and you don't look for long term partnership. And again, when it comes to your family, unfortunately, they're always last. You're always working.

And in fact, you only pay yourself what's left in the business at the end of the month. You've got to start making long term investments if you're going to get your business unstuck. Why is it important to have a business instead of a job? Well, first of all, because you can actually go on vacation, the business will run without you, and you can continue to make money. If you have a business, you can leverage your time and you'll be building value for your business. If you ever want to sell it.

A business is never very valuable when it's just all about you. So let's talk about the ways that you need to get unstuck in this area. The first one is, you have to articulate what your long term vision is. Go back to your original business plan. What were you going to do two or three or five years ago? How has that really changed?

Remember, in section one of this video we talked about, you have to focus in on what pain do you solve for customers, and who really are the customers that can pay to solve that pain. Think about what your annual financial goals are. It's great to come up with a budget, but make sure that paying yourself is included in whatever budget you come up with. And then you need to have the three critical success factors that you need. In order to get to those goals. I talked about three because mostly, people can't keep more than two or three things in their mind at one time.

Put those three goals on your wall and every decision you have to make, filter them through those critical success factors. Think about how does your business actually make money Now we're getting to detail in the get wealthy section of this video series. But does your business grow by increasing the number of customers? Or does it grow by having more revenue per customer? Where can you adjust the cost of goods sold? And what is the actual cost of acquisition for that customer?

Remember, it's not what a customer buys one time, but it's the value that they have over a long period of time. We call this LTV or lifetime value of a customer. What are the key leverage points in your business? Is it that as you acquire more people, as a consulting business, you can grow and make more money on the gross profit isn't really a product, you're developing a lot of time and money into a single product, like a video game, where you develop it once and then resell it for a lot of money to many people over a longer period of time. Is it your intellectual property property? Is it propriety distribution agreements you have?

Is it a customer annuity that once you land that customer, they stay with you for a very long time? Because the barriers to exit are really high. Also think about who are really your best customers? And how are you treating them differently than everybody else. You can't be satisfied with just having a job, just having money in your pocket. If you're truly going to be successful, you've got to build a business so you can go on vacation, make more money, and build a business has value outside of you.

Think back when we said in the first step of this video series, how are you going to strive for minimal achievement? And what is the one thing that you're going to change as a result of this video? This is Barry maltz still getting small business unstuck. Have a great day.