Not A Hobby

Episode 86

Starting and growing a business is often romanticized as a thrilling adventure filled with success and satisfaction. However, the stark reality is far more challenging and requires grit, unwavering belief, deep dedication and sacrifice.

Before You Get Tired

Anyone can stumble in the pursuit of building a business. There are habits to overcome. Attitudes and distractions are abundant. And I will tell you that if you treat your business like a mere hobby, it will not blossom into a successful enterprise. You can throw all that movie-crap out the window right now. The unicorn and rainbows only show up after a lot of sweat and toil. But before you tire and quit, let me emphasize that true commitment involves prioritizing business growth over personal leisure activities. And when you choose to accept the importance of perseverance in the face of challenges you’ve won a battle that’s bigger than you might recognize.

Are You Serious

Some of the most common tendencies I see among young or early business owners is the illusion of “work-life-balance”. Those who choose to prioritize leisure activities over essential business tasks, will often find disaster. That disaster is only permanent if you continue to choose it. But if you do, I can tell you it leads to stagnation and the death of your business. Listen, I love the Buffalo Bills. I have personal interests and family. While activities like attending soccer games or social outings are valuable, they should not come at the expense of critical business operations. For my clients to be successful I stress the importance of maintaining focus. My clients’ dedication, particularly in the initial years of business growth, is most often the single most crucial element of their survival and success.

Enjoyment vs Drudgery

The significance of managing the less glamorous aspects of running a business cannot be over-stated. Tasks like invoicing, forecasting, and maintaining separate financial accounts aren’t what most of us would consider fun. These tedious tasks are vital for ensuring cash flow and financial stability. I caution against procrastination. I’d like more sleep! But the necessity of completing these tasks promptly allows me and my cleaning company clients to avoid financial strain. By handling these responsibilities diligently, your business can avoid the pitfalls of financial mismanagement. And doing so ON TIME helps you to maintain a clear picture of your business’s financial health.

Focus & Sacrifice

Setting realistic expectations and being prepared for the sacrifices is a huge part of successful entrepreneurship. We’ve all had to forgo leisure activities and social engagements to focus on building a successful business from scratch. In the long-term, success often requires years of hard work and persistence. Remember WHY you’re doing this and WHO it impacts. Many businesses do not survive past their first year, only because they lacked resilience and unwavering commitment.

Don’t Go Alone

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road. But you don’t have to travel alone. And you REALLY don’t have to learn everything by doing it wrong the first time. I remember those lessons and the coaches who worked with me. By seeking guidance and support from experienced mentors, I was able to build a thriving business. The value of a knowledgeable coach resides in their direction and encouragement during the challenging phases of business growth. When you maintain a positive mindset and remain open to learning, growth happens. It’s through adapting that entrepreneurs successfully navigate the complexities of business ownership and ultimately achieve their goals. When you’re ready to take your cleaning business to the next level, contact me here.

This Week’s Podcast transcript can be found below.

 

00:08 Ray
Joel, on occasion, you and I have exchanged texts and in fact, phone calls at three o’clock in the morning.

00:14 Joel
We have.

00:15 Ray
It’s not always because I got up to use the can.

00:18 Joel
No, it’s because we’re usually thinking about business and working on our businesses because we’re trying to grow our businesses.

00:24 Ray
Because we are serious about growing our businesses.

00:26 Joel
That is true, and it’s not for the faint of heart.

00:30 Ray
It is not. I am aghast at the people I talk to who seem to run their business like it’s their hobby.

00:37 Joel
Oh, God. How many times have we actually talked about people that we either personally know or businesses that we have seen struggle that are always publicly whining and complaining that their business isn’t growing. And yet you know that they’re off to the soccer game, they’re off to the movies, they’re going on a date, they want to go meet with their friends.

01:00 Ray
All of which are worthy pursuits.

01:03 Joel
They are. But if you’re trying to grow a business and complaining that there’s no business. I love the Buffalo bills, but when I first started growing this business, that was secondary.

01:12 Joel
Yeah, Joel, I’ve heard the term work-life balance, and there is some reality to that. (There is.) I tend to look at it more like a teeter totter. And by that, I simply mean, if you’re balancing, no one’s having fun on either end of that. Be fully committed to one side. Work your butt off. And when it’s time to take a break, be with family, do your hobbies, go to the other side. Go hard, be fully present. When we look at cleaning company owners, new business owners, what are some of the characteristics that you see that go along with treating their business like a hobby? We can talk about the results. But what are some of those characteristics that our listeners might end up seeing in themselves?

01:51 Joel
Sometimes the busy work in a business that has to be done, they want to back burner it and go out to dinner with their friends. Then by the time they’ve gone to dinner with their friends and had a good time and eaten a full meal, now they’re tired and they want to go home and just go to sleep and not worry about the busy work in their business because who likes writing bills? Who likes writing forecasts? Nobody. I mean, I don’t like it. I like to be busy. I like to see progress. But the busy work of doing the invoicing, things like that, it’s important. If the invoicing doesn’t go out, you don’t get paid. The longer it takes to go out from the time that work that’s been completed? If you wait a week to do it, that’s a week longer. You got to wait for the money. Then when you don’t have money coming in, now you’re off trying to maybe, I don’t know, do DoorDash, Uber, something like that, and try to get some quick money in that way.

02:43 Ray
What we’ve talked about right there is Putting off the drudgery work because we all have drudgery work at our work.

02:48 Joel
But procrastination is huge.

02:50 Ray
Then splitting your attention between, I could go out right now and get a filler job. There are times that we’ve had to do that in our career. (Oh, no doubt) But not because we didn’t get the drudgery work done.

03:03 Joel
We got our primary stuff done first. Sometimes people who are in new relationships, whether it’s a new dating relationship, a new marriage, or whatever. They want to spend a lot of quality time with that individual who might have a normal 9-to-5-type job. While in the cleaning world, depending on if you’re a maid service and working in people’s homes, you’re probably starting very early in the morning and working to early afternoon. Or if you’re in a commercial cleaning like I am, you might have morning accounts, afternoon accounts, evening accounts, and maybe even C-shift accounts, depending on verticals that you’re working on. So, you don’t have a normal maybe sit-down dinner time. So, when that new relationship enters your life, now you want to spend more time doing that than growing your business. When I started my business, my business partner, I was very honest and upfront with them saying, “We are starting from nothing. We are starting on a shoestring.” We did not have a lot of investment capital to go into our business. We were going to have to do the work ourselves. That meant we didn’t get to do a lot of the fun things that our friends used to do. Or that we’d get these calls, “Hey, you want to go dinner tonight?”

04:08 Joel
“You want to go to the show? Want to go to the game?” We couldn’t. That got to be too much for them because I told them it would be about 5-7 years. As we approach that time and we put in all this time and the business was finally starting to take hold and starting to get traction, it still wasn’t great, but it was the traction we needed to propel us. They wanted out, and that’s okay. It wasn’t for them. I’m glad that they figured it out so that I could then pick up things and continue because I had faith in this. But then again, it was almost like a whole restart. I pushed off a lot of things and didn’t do necessarily a lot of fun things. I still found time to do things. But I had to be very picky about the things that I did. That’s the difference between treating your company as a business and treating it as a hobby.

04:52 Ray
Can I go for a nuts-and-bolts item that goes along with this? (Absolutely.) One of those that I’ve seen, someone starting a small business, they fail to see the importance of setting up a separate bank account for the business. Now, in a previous podcast, we talked about sub accounts, separate accounts, ways to divvy out the sales tax, the float, setting aside funds for materials, all those things. I’m going far simpler than that.

05:17 Joel
You are.

05:18 Ray
Just a separate account for the business.

05:21 Joel
People tend to mingle their personal money with their business money. As soon as you do that, as our good attorney, Trisha CiFuentes of Dawson Law Firm would say that pierces the corporate veil when you co-mingle money. The other thing is you have X number of dollars and you don’t know which dollar is which. Having that separate account is key.

05:43 Ray
But those are some of the base level critical items and really being committed to your success. Understanding that you are going to have to sacrifice some things to have your business.

05:55 Joel
Yes. A lot of people aren’t willing to necessarily do that. But if you want to be successful in business, it’s usually those first 5-7 years are the most critical. Most businesses don’t even make it to a year. By year five, almost 75% of the businesses started or gone. It’s often like this one little cartoon that you see. And I know you and I’ve both seen it, of digging for the diamonds. The one person, it looks like they’re about 4 feet away from hitting that diamond thing, and they gave up and walked away. The other person is still going at it with the enthusiasm, and they’re within an inch of cracking that. That’s exactly what it is like in business. Because people say, “I’m bleeding money. I have to put a tourniquet on. To do that, I have to go get a job working for somebody else.” But if you keep at it and you keep persistent. You keep doing the right things, you will hit that diamond gold-mine and you will become successful. You will have the funds that you would hope to and live the dreams that you wanted to when you first started the company.

06:53 Ray
On top of that, we had an episode on perfect practice. Yes. No business is perfect, no client is perfect. Client is perfect. And regardless of what business you start, there are always going to be some messy parts. Accepting that is just fine. But deciding that you will be consistent. That you will be at your business, that you will look for good resources. That you will look for a good business coach. And if you can find a good cleaning business coach, maybe you should use them. Sorry, shameless plug. Just deciding that it’s going to be hard and that’s okay. I think that mindset is huge. And it is one of the things that I have said to you. Brother, you are the most resilient person I have ever met. Folks, if you are trying to do this, you need to contact Joel. Joel, thank you.

07:41 Joel
You’re welcome.