Is Your Business a Personal Prison or Financial Freedom?
For many small business owners, starting a business is a dream of financial freedom; doing what they love and working when they want. Unfortunately, more often, it becomes a personal prison where they are required to work more hours than any job they’ve ever had and serve customers they dislike.
How do you identify if starting a business will be a personal prison or financial freedom for you?
David Neagle, founder of Life Is Now, Inc, discusses four questions every aspiring small business owner needs to ask in order to set themselves up for success.
Click here to listen to David’s segment
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01:24 BM: Well, how do you identify if starting your own business will result in a personal prison or personal freedom? My next guest has the five questions you gotta ask yourself, and the meaning behind each. David Neagle is the founder of the multi-million dollar global coaching company called Life Is Now Inc, helping thousands of entrepreneurs, experts, and self-employed professionals gain the confidence and find the right mindset to increase their revenue. He’s also the best-selling author of “The Millions Within”, a book focusing on intention, focus, and awareness to build your dream business and life. David, welcome to the show.
02:04 David Neagle: Thanks for having me. A pleasure to be here.
02:05 BM: So I always said that, you know I’ve started three businesses, and I said, “Well, if I knew what I was getting into, I probably wouldn’t have done it.” Because sometimes it does feel like, instead of building your dream job or your dream avocation, you’ve really built a personal prison for yourself. How do you identify or prevent that?
02:27 DN: Well, number one, I think that you need to pick something that you love to do. If you look at a business like you do a job, and most people go to work in a job with something that they really don’t love to do, it’s really not what’s in their heart, then every day you’re showing up to something that you start to build resentment around, and that definitely turns into a personal prison. But if you’re picking something that you’re really passionate about doing, and as you start to build that business, you remember what your core competency is, what are the things that you like to do the most, and you become better at those, and then you hire experts to do the things in your business that you’re not so good at or maybe you don’t even like to do. I think that that breeds freedom within the business, it keeps people inspired, it causes creativity, it creates fantastic culture within the company, and it could really be a lot of fun.
03:22 BM: And I think, David, that’s really the rum. Because what happens is people start with the passion and doing what they really love but then they’ve gotta do all the things in the business that they don’t really love and… Kinda like the financial side of the business a lot of people hate, it really does become their personal prison. I love that phrase you use.
03:41 DN: Yeah, absolutely, and the other thing is, how did you start the business? A lot of people today, they bootstrap it, right? They have to earn a certain amount of money right from day one when they open the doors in order to keep those doors open. They don’t have an investment or investors to be able to finance it until it starts to really get off the ground. So when you’re bootstrapping a business, that’s true, you are doing a lot of the things that you don’t like to do and you may not even be proficient at doing, which then causes more problems and it causes more aggravation. And again, you’re creating a prison around yourself. So I always suggest to people, I say, “Let’s look at what you really have here. How much money do you need to earn? How long can you keep the business going based on the amount of money that you’re bringing in? And what aren’t you good at?” If the person is willing to invest back the profit in the business itself, take a little bit less for them and put it in the business so that they can actually cause growth, then you’re on your way to more freedom.
04:45 DN: But I always caution someone when I say a business requires everything that you can give it. I mean, it’s not something to take lightly because it’s not for everybody to be in a business. And you are the one… You’re the leader, You’re the one that’s responsible for everything. It doesn’t matter if somebody screwed something up; you’re responsible for it. And you have to be willing to do what it takes in order to change those things so that the business continues to grow, they stay innovative, and that you stay relevant in whatever industry you’re in.
05:16 BM: You also talk about that people don’t spend enough time building infrastructure in their business, and I think a lot of small business owners don’t realize how much process needs to be there because small business can’t be, “Oh, we’re just gonna make it up every single day.”
05:33 DN: Absolutely, you cannot scale without the correct infrastructure. Another problem that is very common for business owners is they are… We call them control freaks. They have to control everything. And you have to let go of pieces of the business and trust other people to be able to do work that you really shouldn’t be doing so that the business could grow. And I see a lot of people really struggle with that idea because they feel like nobody else can do it as good as they can, or they don’t trust people with the money, or they don’t trust people with trade secrets that are in the business. So that part there is about personal growth, and I think that it needs to be a foundational value, an ethic of not only the owner but everybody that comes into the company, so that people can be empowered to do the work that they need to do, and that the owner doesn’t have to be in control. And the other thing is that you really do need to… However many employees that you have, you need to manage them beyond their core competency, what they do.
06:37 DN: These people have lives, and they have problems, and they don’t always show up to work every day with their head completely in the game. And it’s the responsibility of the owner and the people that are managing those individuals to make sure that they’re staying at their best, and also help supply them with what they need so that they can build those structures, and they feel free to come to you and say, “Here’s something that’s not working,” or, “Here’s a better way to do this,” so that everybody can win as a team and the whole business can win as a team. And I think that that then creates more freedom, not just for the owners, but the people that are in there. They really love to come to work and they enjoy what it is that they do.
07:17 BM: But how do you make that transition, David? ‘Cause I think one of the hardest parts for a lot of small business owners, they do everything themselves, they’ve set up their organization so it’s a hub-and-spoke. They’re in the middle, everybody that works for them some is around, and they feel kind of good that everything has gotta go through them, but it’s not leverage-able. Where do you start to trust other people to do parts of the business that maybe you should let go of?
07:42 DN: Well, it’s trust… That’s a great question, you have to… You trust, but you verify. So it’s holding people accountable. It’s not just blind trust where you give somebody a job or a task or a set of things that they need to accomplish, and then you walk away from it and you don’t check on anything. Trust is built over time. But I have found this: That the first person you need to learn to trust is yourself. The business owner has to ask themselves a very honest question, and it’s radical honesty. Can I trust myself to do what I say that I’m gonna do? If I can build that trust with me first, it’s gonna be easier for me to hold other people accountable. If I don’t have trust in myself, I’m gonna overlook trust with other people. And that’s where I see then people get into trouble because then people just go and do whatever they wanna do, or you might end up hiring somebody that is not ethical and they’re stealing from you, but the trust has to come from the business owner first. They need to 100% come from the ethic. If I say I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it no matter what. Absolutely no excuses.
08:51 BM: So how do you transfer that trust to other people ’cause so many small business owners say, “Well, I’d rather do it myself. I don’t wanna train them and show them how to do it because it’ll just get done faster if I do it.” How do you get them away from that? Because, again, a leader leverages other people, a leader doesn’t do it all themselves.
09:10 DN: Right, yeah, absolutely. So it comes back to the goal. If I was coaching a business owner, I would ask them, “What’s the goal for your company?” And then you have to realize that either your practices are going to expand and allow you to achieve that goal, or they’re gonna keep you doing everything yourself. So I would ask them, “Why don’t you trust people? What is the problem?” And then, like you said, it’s, “Well, I can get it done faster. I could make sure that it’s always gonna happen the correct way.” So one of the core values that’s in a business owner is the ability to take chances or the ability to risk more than the average person can. And letting them know that and help them strengthen that ability, but also put things in place where there’s competency, and that things are verified that they’re being done correctly. So yes, it is difficult for them to do it, but generally once they start doing it, they start getting good feedback on it, you find that they start trusting more and they’re able to let go more. And they’re generally happier because they’re doing what they like to do, and they start to see the business be able to grow.
10:22 BM: We’re talking with David Neagle. He’s the author of the book called “The Millions Within.” David, I gotta read something that was in the press kit, which I just loved. You asked the question, “Are you only starting a business to get rich or have more freedom? This is a detrimental mindset. You only are getting into a business so you don’t have to work. This is a middle class mindset. We can date this back to your mom and dad working to not work anymore. If you’re gonna start a business, you need to like to work. It should be the one thing you love. It should be a place you love to express yourself and inspire your employees to do the same. It will create a positive and productive work environment.” David, I think that is so well said because I think so many people don’t realize that if you own your own business, you gotta love to work.
11:03 DN: You have to love the process, no question. And almost everybody that goes through the traditional school system, whether it’s in the United States or around the world, are actually indirectly taught to work for the time that they get off. We do that in school, right from grade school. When is recess? When is summer vacation? When is Easter vacation?
11:23 BM: When’s the weekend? [chuckle]
11:27 DN: Yeah, work for the weekend. We have the sayings around it. You have “hump day”. You have “Thank God that it’s Friday.” So people are always looking for, “When can I stop doing the thing that I don’t like to do?” And you cannot take that mentality into a company. It has to be that the company comes first. Yes, there has to be some kind of work-life balance, but I also find that when a person is doing what they love, they don’t feel that they need to get away from it, other than maybe recharge their batteries, but it’s not something that they’re looking to escape from. And I think that if they don’t recognize that they’re actually working for when they get time off, they don’t plan correctly. They don’t build the business with the idea of, “How can I put my resources into this business so that it expands, and I’m not worried about when I’m gonna retire. I’m not worried about how many weeks of vacation that I get.”
12:23 DN: So it’s a very different mindset that the average person is raised with, and most people don’t even know that that’s kind of the way that they’re viewing the world. When do I actually get off from what I’m doing? But whether you own a business or you work for somebody else, I think the key thing is, are you happy? Are you doing something that you love? Life is way too short to spend on time doing things that you absolutely don’t love to do. So I always encourage people, I’m like, “Put that… That should be the number one goal. Not getting rich.” If you do what you love to do and you’re really willing to work hard and put the dedication in, you can become rich and that’s a great thing because you can live a better lifestyle, you can help more people, you can become really productive in the community overall, but happiness should come before wealth.
13:10 BM: Yeah, I never liked the expression, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” I always say, “Do what you love, and even if the money doesn’t follow, at least you’ve done what you loved.” [chuckle]
13:21 DN: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely because the money may not be there. Depending on what the company is, whether it’s a small business, a large business, whatever it might be, if the company is not designed or it doesn’t have the product or service that has large margins, it may not have the ability to make you wealthy. It might just be more of a service orient business where you can live a nice lifestyle, but you’re not necessarily gonna be a billionaire. And that’s great if you’re doing what you love. On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with getting rich either. So if you’re gonna get rich, do it in a way where the stress part’s not gonna kill you and make you sick. ‘Cause I don’t think that people really get sick or die or have heart attacks or whatever because they work too hard. I think people get sick like that when they’re working too hard and they hate what they’re doing. It’s a totally different energy in the body, and it does affect you physically, and it affects all the people around you.
14:19 BM: Last question I wanted to ask you with the minute we have left is, you say that people have the wrong view of what the Law of Attraction is. They just can’t sit there and say, “Hey, I wanna attract people that are gonna pay me money.” It’s really something different.
14:32 DN: Yeah, it’s actually very different. The Law of Attraction basically explains that whatever we focus on in our mind, we’re literally giving a command to our mind to pay attention to that thing. So building a business or your life in general, when you’re consciously doing it, is very much like a jigsaw puzzle. You build an image in your mind of the way you want your business to be and then your attention focuses on what are all pieces that I need to put together for the completion of that picture. That’s why, when you buy a jigsaw puzzle, there’s a picture on the front of it. So you know what it is that you’re building. But it’s not going to move… The puzzle piece is not gonna move across the table and put itself in place. You have to be willing to do the work. It changes your focus. There’s a lot of truth to the Law of Attraction, but it’s not, “I’m gonna sit on my couch, build a picture in my mind, and then everything is gonna come to me without any effort on my part at all.” That’s a misnomer, that’s bad marketing, that’s bad sales.
15:32 BM: Well, David, I appreciate you being on the show. If you wanna reach David, you can go to davidneagle.com. It’s D-A-V-I-D N-E-A-G-L-E dot com. David, thanks much for joining us.
15:43 DN: Thank you for having me, real pleasure.
15:45 BM: This is a AM 820, WCPT in Chicago. We’ll be right back.