It’s all about the flowers and the bees

Now imagine money as bees. You created a company – a net – to catch as many bees as you can. No more bees for the boss, it’s all for you now. Everyday you go out and catch bees. You get better and better and catch more and more bees. Finally you can live the life you wanted and deserve. But everyday you wake up with an empty net and have to go out there and work harder and harder to catch more bees. Until the day someone with a bigger net comes along. Or the bees have simply gone elsewhere. Money, like bees, comes and goes. And when it goes, you’re left with nothing but an empty net; an empty company. 

A company is not a business; it’s just a legal entity. You decide if it becomes a business or not. The difference is that instead of making money, a business – or entrepreneur – is focused on creating wealth. Instead of building a net to catch bees, you grow an inspiring garden of flowers to attract bees. The bigger the garden and the better you nurture it, the more bees will come. You don’t have to fear bees leaving, as there are always new ones coming. Even better, the bees will pollinate your flowers and your effort to maintain your garden decreases when the number of bees rises. Instead of getting up in the morning with an empty net, you wake up in a beautiful flower garden buzzing with bees. 

Starting a company is easy; growing it into a business is hard. It’s the part where most people fail or never even get to. But it’s what makes you an entrepreneur. So, how do you grow a business? How do you move out of being self-employed with a net, to being an entrepreneur with an inspiring garden? How do you move from making money to creating something of value?

First, let clarify this: just like there is no such thing as get-rich-quick, there isn’t a proven concept or secret formula to grow your business. But from experience I can tell you there are a couple of things I found to be true over and over again. Here are some of them:

Without a goal, you can’t score

Established businesses are not the end product of a serial process beginning with infancy and moving through adolescence to reach maturity. They start out with a vision of that maturity. If you want to grow a business successfully, you need to have a perspective on what your business is and why it works. Any established business knows how it got to be where it is, and what it must do to get where it wants to go. 

To grow, you need to have a model of a business that works instead of a model for the work itself. You need to ask yourself if there’s a connection between where the business is going and where it is today. It’s not the work itself that is important. What’s important is the business: how it looks, how it acts. Which plants do you need in your garden? How big will it be? To grow a business you have to focus on building your foundation instead of only concentrating on money making activities. From working in the company, you have to work on the business.

Look at the business as the product. Don’t start with a picture of the business, but with a picture of the customer for whom the business is created. Without a clear picture of your customer, you cannot succeed. If you know your customer, you know what garden to build, which flowers to plant. Without a goal, you just can’t score. 

It’s all about flow

If you’re growing, cash flow is important, but in order to generate it in a sustainable way, emotional flow is equally important. To find emotional flow it is important to realize that if you understand the technical work of a business, that doesn’t necessarily mean you understand a business that does technical work. These are two different things.

Therefore, you need to surround yourself closely with good people who complement you. It allows you to focus on your strengths and passion which is the biggest leverage your business can get. Besides, the expertise of the people around you flows directly to you. 

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing. Too many business owners are driving blindfolded. You have to know how you’re doing at all times. When running and growing a business, there’s no such thing as good news and bad news. There is only fast news and slow news. The sooner you learn about a crisis, the more time you have to convert it into an opportunity. 

Create your company values

If you don’t stand for anything, you’ll fall for everything. Almost any business I know has a mission, a reason why it exists. But very few have values. You have certain values in life, right? For successful living, your business needs values too. It’s what you stand for; what your garden represents. Having company values makes it easier to find the right people, the right customers, the right partners and develop the right strategy. 

In creating your company values, it is important to step aside and think about what values your company needs to succeed in the business that you’re in. It might happen that they don’t match your personal principles. If so, don’t go in that business. Simple as that.

It’s not about the idea

Everyone has ideas. It’s about how well you know your industry. The hard part is figuring out if your idea could work in your industry, doing the preparation work and be able to execute it. Everybody says their idea is special, but very few actually do the work. Do the work. 

Have a positive attitude

Get out of bed with a positive attitude. You are going to screw up. We all do. I can’t tell you how many times I did and do. It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you, because what matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.

Go look in the mirror

Your business is like a mirror: it shows you who you really are, what you truly know and what you don’t know. Honestly, directly and immediately. Your business is nothing more than a distinct reflection of who you are.

If you’re happy making money, then that’s absolutely fine. If you want to grow a business, you need to figure out who you are and where you want to go. Whatever you do, don’t chase the money. Chase your vision and passion; this way you’ll always feel happy doing what you do.