If your business doesn’t meet your personal objectives you’ve not really succeeded. Your business may be a success, made lots of money, have many stores, etc but if that doesn’t deliver what you personally want from life, what’s the point? You’ve now really made a loss rather than a profit from your life.
Start by imagining your own funeral and what you would like to say to all your friends, colleagues and acquaintances about your life, once it’s too late to now do anything about it.
- What would you like your life story to be?
- What would you like to have achieved?
- What would you like your life to have been like?
- What battles would you like to have won?
- What moral values would you like to have lived up to?
Only when you answer these types of questions can you move onto your business and develop that to fulfil your personal objectives.
It may be that you stop there. If a business isn’t going to be the thing that helped you fulfil your life’s ambitions. Better to sort this out up front, than waste precious time going down the wrong road.
Particularly with businesses owned by more than one person, it’s important that each individual owners’ personal objectives can be met by the same business. For example, do you know when your partner wants to exit the business and does this work for your business strategy. If individual goals can’t be met by the same business, it’s time to think again.
You need an open and honest discussion of each other’s personal goals to identify any problem areas at this stage and to then identify a business strategy to deliver those goals for all.
It’s important the business serves the owner, so personal goals must come first.
Here are some questions to answer personally to get you going…
- Are you happy with what you do in the business?
- If not, how would you like to change what you do?
- Do you have a planned retirement date and exit routes and what are they?
- Do you spend enough time away from the business?
- Is there anything you would particularly like to do, success trappings you would like or experiences to have over the next 5 years?
- What don’t you want in your life?
- What do you want out of life?
- What are the most important things for you and what gets in the way?
- What income do you want in each of the next 5 years?
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If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact Southside Accountants Wimbledon & London.