do you have a job or a business

Summary

self employed and business owner are not the same thing. one stops when you stop. the other keeps running. three questions tell you which one you have.

1. is your product or service delivered by a team or technology, not by you personally. if you’re the bottleneck, you have a job.

2. can you handle a 10x increase in customers next quarter without breaking. if not, you don’t have a scalable business yet, you have a manual one.

3. do you have a documented, repeatable process for acquiring new customers. if customer acquisition only works when you do it, you have a job.

answer no to any of these and that’s where to put the next 90 days of work. document the acquisition process, hire or automate yourself out of delivery, stress test the system for a 10x. that’s how a job becomes an asset you could actually sell.

Transcript

introduction to distinguishing a job from a business

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Do you have a job or do you have a business?

What have you created as an entrepreneur? I’m not talking about, are you a W2 employee or are you an entrepreneur who owns a business? I’m talking to the business owners out there, the ones who actually have an LLC, have a whatever corporation, whatever it is that you have. Do you actually have a business or do you have a job? Let’s dive into it. I’m Jerred Moon. This is the Better Human Business Podcast. So the difference between a job and a business is pretty simple.

So if you are starting a new business, you can form the company, do all the things with a state that is required, get the insurance, set up the bank accounts. And you’re like, yeah, I am a business owner. I have a business. And while that might be true that you technically own a business, you might not be a business owner. You might have created yourself a job. Now I’m not throwing any shade here. The only thing I ever wanted to do when I first started was work for myself and be able to provide for my family through activities that I was doing.

the role of systems and teams in scaling your business

That’s it. I mean, that was the threshold. I didn’t really care about if I had something that was scalable. I didn’t really think about or really care about if I was ever going to have employees. None of those things mattered. So as I talk about this today, I’m not talking bad about anyone who may have created themselves a job. I created myself a job. But eventually over time, as you gain more skills, you want to go towards being a business owner and not just having created yourself a job.

Because what you can do and what creating yourself a job looks like is you just are recreating what someone else has already done and created yourself a job. Like you could be a physical therapist that works in a clinic somewhere for someone else and you have a job, but then you can create your own practice and then all you ever do is see patients and you’re never really focused on scaling or hiring or anything like that.

how to prepare your business for significant growth

So all you’ve done is recreate a job that you already had somewhere else, but you kind of get to do it on your own terms. And like I said, that’s okay for a certain amount of time, but over time you’re going to want to get past that. So here are the three questions I have entrepreneurs ask to see if they have a job or a business or what they’re actually working on. The first is, is my product or service delivered by a team or technology?

So those are two of the biggest leverage points that you have in business, our team and technology. And it doesn’t matter the business either, right? If you’re a service provider, you provide services to people. Eventually you will or at first you’re providing those services. Eventually other people will be providing those services as you step further and further back to just be the business owner. Or you could run an online business like you could run software or maybe you sell education, something like that.

the importance of documenting and automating customer acquisition processes

And technology is the person who are the thing that actually delivers this to your customers. Both are very scalable. Teams and technology are scalable and that removes you from having to do it. But if I am selling online education as a coach and all I do is someone signs up and I’m coaching them one-on-one, it’s just me and them every single time, that’s great. But what I’ve created is a job, I don’t have a business and I’m going to have to eventually get a team to do that or find out if I could turn this into a course and let technology deliver it.

So that’s the first thing, is my product or service delivered by team or technology? The second thing is, if I got 10 times the amount of customers next month, would I be able to figure out how to handle the increased capacity? Could you actually figure it out? Would you be able to do that? A lot of people say the answer is no and that means you don’t have something that’s scalable. I would have you go through this exercise over and over again.

final thoughts on transitioning from self-employment to true business ownership

Not to plan for some 10 times the amount of customers that’s going to magically come within the next three months but what it would force you to do is realize where you’re not scalable. So we go back to like me being a coach and I bring people on and say my calendar is already kind of maxed out and I’m like, well I got 10 times the amount of customers and I want to fulfill all those customers, what do I do?

Well my time is already tapped out so obviously I’d have to hire someone else, right, or I’d have to use a team or technology to do those things. If I don’t ever go through that thought exercise, that thought experiment, I don’t really know what has to be done but if I just sit here and I think about, okay, well this is who I would have to hire, here’s the hiring process, here’s what they would have to know and then if you have a process for that, now you’re talking about scalability, you’re actually thinking like a business owner or if it’s like, okay, well how could I maybe, you know, I have 10 times the amount of customers that want to work with me, maybe they can’t work with me one-on-one, maybe I create a course and technology can deliver those things, now we’re talking about scalability, we’re talking about really being a business owner, stepping away from just trading my time for money.

So go through that. A lot of people can’t say yes to the fact that if I 10X the amount of, you know, customers this month, most people can’t say yes to that, they would not be able to do that but thinking through that would really help you understand kind of what the next steps are for you as you want to continue and scale your company. The third question is, do I have a documented and repeatable process to acquire new customers?

Do you? Is this in your company right now? And if it’s not, how do you get it there? Because I don’t like how most people treat customer acquisition and marketing like it’s some dark art that has no scientific or mathematical basis and it’s really just, yeah, I don’t know, I have some conversations with people, sometimes I get a referral, sometimes this happens, whatever, yeah. Why would you not want to try and scale that? That’s the ultimate lever, right?

Why haven’t you spent any time on having that documented exactly? Okay, if you had a conversation with somebody that led to getting a referral, can you repeat that process? Can you make that a process so it’s documented, someone else can do that if you hire someone else to do it? Or it’s at least a checklist you can follow to try and scale it up and when you’re having a low month and you need more customers, it’s like, okay, well, let’s go back to the playbook.

Let’s go back to the documented process and repeat what we’ve done in the past. So start thinking through that as well, again, not thinking of marketing and customer acquisition as a dark art where we’re getting lucky to have customers. If you don’t really know how you’re getting your customers, you are just kind of getting lucky. You might be doing a lot of the great things, but you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, which means you can’t repeat it.

You can’t scale it and you sure as hell couldn’t open another business because you don’t actually know what you’re doing. So make sure that you have a documented and repeatable process. So those are the three things. Ask yourself those three questions and if you can say yes to all three, then you definitely have a business over a job because the first one is it makes sure you’re not bottlenecking your business, right? So it starts to eliminate you.

The second question, make sure that you have scalable systems and a third ensures you have scale, a scalable marketing and sales process. If all of those things are scalable, you truly are a business owner and you’ll be in a position to one, be able to get more time freedom because you’ll be able to step out of the business more, which is awesome. But two, it gives you an actual sellable asset and not enough people think about that with their business.

Just like if you own a car, you own a home, you own any asset. Well, I wouldn’t argue a car is not really an asset, but you own any other asset. You can go sell that thing, right? It’s no different than a business, but a lot of business owners don’t think that way in the beginning stages. They think, yeah, I’m just happy to have a job. I’m just happy to be making some money. But you’ve got to think 10, 15, 20 years out, what if you want to sell this thing?

No one’s going to want to buy anything from you. If the only way this thing works is if you sit there and do all the work because they don’t want to buy you, right? You’re trying to leave. You’re trying to go do something else. So they don’t really need to buy what you have. Maybe they buy your contacts. Maybe they buy your location, something like that, but they don’t, you’re not going to get a whole lot of money for that if it’s so dependent on you because the investor who might buy your business is now scared that like, well, if we remove that person, does it kill the whole business?

But if you have all these other things in place and you’re like, look, I’ve basically stepped out. I know how to scale our marketing and our acquisition. I know how to expand. If we need to expand quickly, I know who we need to hire, the processes that’s in place. And most of what we do is implemented by team and technology. So this is something that you want to buy. Now an investor comes in and sees that and they’re like, oh wow, we could remove this person and this business can still grow.

We can probably plug a different operator in here and get a huge ROI on our money. Now you’re going to get a lot more money when you go to sell your business. And Hey, if you don’t want to sell your business, cool, you’re going to have a lot of time freedom. If you do want to sell your business down, you know, later down the road, you’re prepared for that as well. Now I know none of these things are easy.

You’re going to have to do a lot of work to get organized here and to work through all of these different, you know, systems and processes, but ultimately you just need to try harder.