Preventing Your Business From Getting Away From You

My biggest fear in writing Entrepreneurial Leap is making things too simple for you. By removing so many obstacles for you, you might grow bigger than you should. Clients have said to me more times than I can remember that they wish they’d met me and learned this stuff twenty years earlier. These are very successful entrepreneurs in their forties, fifties, and sixties who are just learning what I’m telling you right now. They know how much further along they’d be if they’d learned it in their twenties or thirties.

While I could not be more excited about sharing these strategies with you, I do wonder if you’ll know when enough is enough. As David Packard of Hewlett-Packard put it, “A successful company is more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little.”

The Danger of Too Much Opportunity

Let’s pretend your ten-year goal is to build a $10 million, highly profitable, high-end local home-entertainment installation business with twenty employees, which allows you time for your family, friends, and a personal life. After five years, you become well-known, have raving fans, are winning business awards, receiving press, and collecting accolades. You get so caught up in the hype that someone talks you into opening other locations in other states. In addition, your clients love your service so much, and you’re already working in their homes installing home-entertainment systems, so it just makes sense to install alarm systems and computer equipment as well. Then you find yourself in ten years with a $50 million company installing alarms, computers, and high-end home-entertainment systems in five states. You have no passion for computers or alarm systems. You’re traveling constantly and are responsible for a hundred employees. You’re not very profitable, and you’re miserable.

You might be surprised by the number of times this scenario happens to entrepreneurs. That’s why it’s important to decide now what you really want in the future, so the future doesn’t get away from you. So many entrepreneurs have a run of success, start adding products or services and locations they never should have, or have more employees than they ever wanted. They get away from what they love to do, what they’re passionate about, and what their company’s true sweet spot is. Many people have a hard time saying no to opportunities.