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So, working IN your business vs ON your business! So, when you’re working in your business, you are actually working on today’s income, whereas when you work on your business, you are working on tomorrow’s income. Does that make sense? So, let’s dive into another episode of the Bilna Sandeep Show!
In order to record today’s episode, I was just randomly searching for some business-related codes. Because I wanted to say that as the hook which you say in the beginning, so that’s what I wanted to try. But I actually came across this quote, which actually says that
“When you are working IN your business, that means you’re working for today’s income. And when you are working on your business, then you’re working ON tomorrow’s income”.
Does that make sense, guys? I mean, a lot of people don’t even realise this factor. A lot of business owners, I see, they’re working really hard, day and night, 24/7 in their business, trying to grow and trying to push through. I think you can relate to that, right?
Even I have been in that mode myself for quite a bit of time when I actually launched my business as my very first full-time model. So now, for those of you who don’t know the difference between what I’m trying to say about working IN your business versus ON your business, I’m going to give you a few examples.
Understanding Working IN Your Business.
For example, if you are a product-based business, and if you are the one sitting and making that product, okay?
Maybe you are a baker; you are the one baking the cake and delivering the cake, or doing all the administrative work, or, you know, packing the cake and everything if that is what you are doing, or if you are some other type of business, like some other product-based business. You are the one who is doing the administrative work as well. You are the one who’s doing the hiring and onboarding, you are the one who is doing the team training, you are the one who is doing the marketing for your business, and you are the one who’s doing the sales for your business. All of this if you are the one doing it, you know, or I’m not even talking about you are the one.
Okay, let’s just define these activities! These activities, which I have described now, are what we could say are working IN your business.
How to know if your business is ready to scale? Check this out!
Understanding Working ON Your Business
Now every business owner at some point or the other, will definitely have to work IN their business, at least in the beginning stages of their work, that is for sure. Right. But now let’s look at what includes working ON your business. Now, ON your business, includes the strategic planning that you do, the research and development that you do for your products, creating systems for your business, creating alliances and partnerships for your business, bringing on board the right kind of collaborations for your business, looking out for funding for your business, looking at the financial projections of your business, and running through the financial reports of your business. All these are what I mean by working ON your business. I hope it’s quite clear for you. Now, how are we going to draw the balance? How are you going to go to that mode of working on your business?
The Next Step for Small Business Owners: Working ON Your Business for Long-Term Success
I would say once you are quite established, you need to have very few activities that come in the first category, which is working IN your business, and you have to move to that mode of working ON your business. I mean, if you want to keep your business really small, you’re only looking at the income that you want to have for today. If that is the case, then it’s fine to be still working in your business, but if you look at a long-term future for your business and going into a scaling phase. That’s what I would say.
I mean, you can still run on the same model where you are working IN your business for years and years because as long as there is demand for your product, you’re still going to get it. But how much can you scale it? Maybe you have a certain set of income and it reaches a plateau level, right? And above that you are not able to scale, if you are into that mode of working IN your business. This is why I say that you need to somehow move to that phase where you are working ON your business if you want to have that scalability factor in your business and want to reach more customers.
Now, if you are a baker and if you are the one doing everything yourself, there is a limit to the number of orders you can take in a day, or in a week, or in a month, right? So, what is the next way you can grow? How can you really scale your business? What can you do? So, these are things we are going to look at today.
Breaking Blind Spots: The Power of Outside Perspectives
And what I’ve seen is some businesses, even though they have more of the mode of working ON their business, what happens is even I am telling about myself, as well. We always need some people who have a holistic view and who can actually give you an outside view of your business, because when we are too close to our business. What happens is that there may be a lot of areas we are missing out on. Those are your blind spots, right? And you need somebody from outside to actually tell you.
So, inside our Homepreneurs Club for women entrepreneurs in Dubai, during our different sessions or networking events or during our workshops, I do talk about different areas of your business and also some of the members approach me and I discuss their business and I’m able to spot their blind spots very well and give them advice. But I will never be able to find my own blind spots. How much ever expertise I grow to, right? I have always resorted… I mean, I have always looked for the help of other business owners who are similar to me or in a completely different business, but probably they are well established. Some of them are not well-established also, whatever is that but when you are able to share some sides of your business with somebody else, what happens is that they give you that output.
I mean, they give you that feedback, which probably is going to change the track of your whole business itself? Because they’re seeing it from the bird’s eye view. They’re able to see where you are missing out, where you have holes in your business. Now, before I go further into how you’re going to move on to the sides of working ON your business? I would say the first thing that you need to be able all to do is have a review of everything that is currently being done in your business by yourself. If you have a team, what everybody is doing, what are the activities that you do in your business, that is the very first thing, that is to re-evaluate everything.
Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Business!
Workshop for Women Entrepreneurs in Dubai
So now I am doing a workshop not just for my Homepreneurs Club members but mainly focusing on women entrepreneurs in Dubai. We are doing a workshop on the 10th of May. It’s going to be a full-day workshop. In the morning sessions, we are going to focus on completely reevaluating their current business structure, their business model, what is their current ideal customer, what they do, what is the pricing they have, do they have the right pricing, all these things, as what we are going to make them do during the workshop. Register here!
If you would like to join as well, I’m also putting the link in the show notes and in the blog post so that you can also come and join the workshop. It’s an in-person workshop in Dubai by the way. So, in case you’re listening from some other part of the world, I hope we could do some sessions like that online as well later on. But the reason I wanted to keep it as an in-person workshop is because we wanted to keep it as a very closed workshop with very few people and I wanted to take it really good look at their businesses and give them some solid feedback and get them to do their exercises. So, I’m going to be coming with a lot of worksheets and notebooks where you’re going to write down a lot of things, and we’re gonna brainstorm a lot of things together.
So, this is what we will be doing in that morning session. So, what I wanted to tell you about working on your businesses is when you move from working IN your business to that ON your business mode, you really need some external help. It can be a good friend and a mentor as well, but someone who can really see that. This is why I decided to do this workshop so that I can see your business from that outsider’s point of view and I can give you the right areas to look for those blind spots in your business. So that’s the first thing that I wanted to tell you about.
Revamping My Marketing Agency: Lessons Learned
Then I also want to share my experience. So, I ran a marketing agency as well. So, when I started off last year we started back in December 2021. So, when I started as a full-time marketing agency owner, I started by giving services, like very small packages to small business owners. The reason why I started with small business packages, was I thought it might be easier to sell and it would help me in building my portfolio. This is, I mean, this is what a lot of us do right?
We all need to start somewhere. We didn’t have a portfolio as an agency, so we wanted to build that portfolio. So, we started giving really very minimal offers, but those were actually giving us losses in a business but that’s okay because we use that also to set my team and the structure of our team and everything, but we kept on going in the same path, and we were though we increased the pricing of our packages and everything, but something was not right.
We were not really able to scale up even when I had hired a team of, I think, by probably around last November, which was like, 10, 11 months, down the line, we had it around a team of eight people who are working full-time, but even then, we were not making a huge impact in terms of revenue or, you know, that was not really growing for us. And I had to put a stop to a few things and I had to completely revamp.
So, you might have seen that, I had previously an account that is named Homepreneurs on Instagram. Right now, that account you will not find it because we archived every post in there because that was the account we were using for marketing our agency. We archived everything, we let go of everything, we completely rebranded it. We came up with a new name called “Growwie” for our agency.
And the best part is we cut off everything, cut off all the noise and we defined our ideal customer. That was the biggest difference we made because we said that we are only going to focus from now onwards from medium to large-scale businesses, having a certain set of revenue, and our packages are going to be Performance Marketing packages where it’s going to be focused on the revenue of the customer. This was a whole game changer for the agency because it made a whole difference. When we cut off, when we stopped all the smaller packages, which we had for the agency, I mean, we still continue on with the clients, which we onboarded earlier because they are the ones who trusted us in the beginning, and we continue to give them the best service that we can.
But that wouldn’t let me continue as a business because we weren’t making much profit from there, right? And the expenses of running a business was huge. So now that we have a proper definition for our client, the pricing. So, we reviewed the ideal client persona, we reviewed and changed the pricing, we completely changed the services also. And this led to a huge big shift in my business in terms of revenue.
I was also able to move out from the operations and move on to working ON my business. Now, that is not only because of this change, by the way, that is because we set a proper system, and we went through a lot of structuring and everything, also, during the same time. So, this is how I feel that many businesses lack the knowledge to go through these kinds of processes. And that’s the reason I decided we need to do this workshop also to help them understand.
Re-evaluate, Systemize, and Delegate
So, if you are listening to this episode, I want you to also go back and reevaluate your business in terms of the customers that you’re serving. Isn’t that the right customer that you want to target? Is it the right kind of service you’re offering? Is it the right pricing that you have? All these things once you re-evaluate and define it for yourself and for your team, it’s going to make a huge jump from there and then come back to moving to work ON your business side.
Now, if you need to do this, once you have done this, read this exercise. Now that is still not enough, right? You need to have those systems in place, you need to structure your business, you need to learn to delegate. So, before I used always to say that you should always learn to delegate the task in your business, but that is not enough. You need also to learn to trust the people you delegate to and how that trust can happen. That can only happen once you have made sure; the right people are hired for your team. That is the first thing.
Now hiring the right people in the team is also not enough. Putting them in the right positions is also important because you cannot teach a fish to climb a tree, right? That is what we need to always make sure. You have to see what is the strength of the person that you have hired and put them in the right roles for that. So, all these things are part of growing your business. Then there are also a lot of areas, maybe you are leaving money on the table, by the way.
Financing Business Growth For Women Entrepreneurs in Dubai
Now in order to move and make the shift of working IN your business, to ON your business, of course, it requires some money aspect as well, right? It requires an investment for you to structure your team, first of all, to hire the right kind of team members and then to structure them. And then to invest in training them, all these things require money, right? You need the funds for that. Unless you have somebody supporting you for the funds. If you are a bootstrapped company like mine, you’re going to have that really tough time.
So how are you going to find the funds to do that? This is when you need to start looking at the gaps in your business, probably there are some areas, some of the services or some of the products that you currently sell can have an upsell item. Maybe there’s something already lying on the table, you know. When you buy a particular item, you could give a second item at a discounted rate, and the price and the chances for people to buy that would be higher. That is a quick Revenue boost right? So, we need to have this.
This is also part of another exercise that we are going to do on May 10th in the workshop on finding those areas in your business where you can have that quick revenue boost. And what are you going to do with that revenue? You’re not going to take it back, okay? You are going to reinvest that amount into your business so that you will be able to move out from your business, and move into more and more of working ON your business, versus IN your business.
Now, it also includes you need to develop an abundance mindset before you start investing, if you start investing into your business being really scared. Oh my God, am I going to get this back and my head in the right person? If you always have all this kind of doubt, then you’ll never be able to reach it. You need to trust the process. You need to believe if you need to be able to move out of your business and get other people to do the work for you, you need to be able to let them do that work and trust them that they are going to deliver it for your business, right? So that is another thing.
The Investor Mindset: Taking Calculated Risks for Your Business
Then another thing which you need to really do in order to start working on your businesses is, you need to block out some time every week when you’re able to set goals for the week, you are able to focus, you should have that focus time without any distractions, looking at the numbers of your business looking at the financial reports of your business, looking at the leads and pipeline in your business, how many proposals submitted, how many deals to be closed.
So, this is in the case of a service-based business or if it’s a product-based business, how are you going to develop your business? So, you need to at that focus time when you are sitting there as for your focus time per week in business for your business, you need to step out of the operations role, you need to remove that hat and wear the hat in which you’re coming in as an auditor or somebody from outside who’s seeing the business from outside and re-evaluating and seeing what is going on with the logical brain at that time, it’s more of, than money and numbers and everything. I know some people might not be very comfortable thinking about money, but it is really important.
Now, in one of the interviews which I attended recently; it was another podcast which I was part of. They asked me a question. What type of entrepreneur are you? Are you the kind of person who is really scared to invest in your business, or are you the one who does not have any second thoughts and you just throw money onto your business?
So, I’m not scared of investing in my business, but I don’t throw money away either. What I do is, any investment you do in your business or wherever there is a risk factor involved, right? But it is important to take those as calculated risk, that is important. So, it is more like having an investor mindset when you move on to working ON your business so that you can have that calculated mindset of taking the calculated risks in your business. And I also want you to like if you invest 10,000 Dirhams in your business, you should be able to predict or have a plan in your mind on how you are going to get back ten thousand and in how much time are you going to get that? Or how much of it are you going to get back? If you invest 10,000, are you going to be able to take out 20,000? 30,000 50,000? What does that plan right? So these sorts of calculations are what I do, and you need to be able to.
Patience and Vision: Moving from Working IN to ON Your Business
Again, I always keep telling this part to trust the process. You need to be able to have patience. Now when you invest in some sort of strategy or some sort of marketing strategy or something in your business, you need to have that patience to be able to reach a phase where you can actually wait to see the results right, there are no overnight results. There is some consistency that is required for one strategy to work.
So, you need to have the patience to wait for those results. So, all these things are happening; those huge mindset shifts happen when you decide to move from working IN your business to ON your business. Now, just deciding is not enough. You need to have somebody to handhold you to reach that phase or you should be able to create a plan for yourself to do it in that way so that you can move from working IN your business to ON your business.
You need to have that execution brain and that visionary brain separately. The execution brain is for your operations part. So whatever things are doing still, there may be a few things, you still might have to work in your business but try to limit it to as low as possible. Just ask yourself this question. Are you able to stay away completely from your business for a few days? The longer you can stay away from your business without any involvement, that is when you have achieved the best, you know, the more you’re able to stay away, the better position you are in on your business.
Don’t Miss The Workshop on May 10th!
So, I want to remind you about the workshop that is happening on the 10th of May. Register here! It’s going to be an in-person workshop in Dubai. In it we are going to reevaluate all the strategies in your business.
So, it’s going to be a full-day session. In the morning session, this is what we will be doing and in the afternoon session, we will be looking at implementing new marketing strategies, we will be looking at your sales processes and how to improve them, we will be looking at how do you network and find the right sort of collaborations for your business? And also the most important part is that we will also be looking at your numbers, and we’ll also be looking at how you can walk away from the full-day workshop with a proper plan so that you can complete 2023 with a bang and one more thing. We’ll look at those blind spots, which were you’re leaving money on the table, and so that if we find those blind spots, we should be able to have a quick revenue boost into your business that you can invest back into your business so that you have that exit route from your business.
So I am leaving the link to the workshop also in the blog post and in the show notes, wherever you’re going to be looking at it. I look forward to seeing you in the workshop if you are a business owner in Dubai
Thank You. See you in the next episode.
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