From Free Agent to Entrepreneur

Posted on | August 10, 2010 | 1 Comment

Been thinking alot these days about how I do business, about where I am, where my company, my evens, blog and agency brands are in the grand scheme of things. My intention was always to create highly profitable businesses that could run without me being involved everyday, in every way…even as I went through my early control freak years, where no one did things better than me, I trusted no one, not my business partners, certainly not those I hired. Then when partnership or company didn’t work I went to being a highly paid free agent. Clearly I was temporarily insane, trying to control everyone and everything – thinking that that was my ticket to success- having the company run exactly the way I wanted it to, I had to do it all myself. Thank God that phase only lasted about 2 years. And I make a bunch of mistakes and learnt a lot from that.

Redefining Success
I started by redefining success for me – it’s now means doing what I love, having the time to spend time with who I love, to go where I love ( I love to travel) and making trailer loads of money while I sleep from businesses that make an impact in the industry or country it seeks to serve and change.

I came to realise over time too that I was increasingly disliking the day to day management of a business-primarily because I thought I wasn’t good at it and I had made some mistakes and was not yet back to trusting myself again. But I did prefer the research, product development, blueprinting and strategising. The truth is along the way I’ve had to choose badly those partners and team members and learn some more.

So it wasn’t long before I learnt too, that for me to be rich in time and money I was going to have to learn to say no to good ideas, yes to the great ones ( I was guilty of falling in love with ideas that only were great in concept but void of viability) and understand that there is a process to all of that. I’d have to learn how to hire the best people, trust them, stay out of their way and watch them shine.

As I move along this journey from being a a highly paid free agent with a fast growing personal brand better at being an entrepreneur, a super successful, happy, healthy, time rich and wealthy one – it was cool to have seen this article today.

It’s Tending Your Turf by T. Harv Eker today and it was a sweet refresher. He starts off like this…”In developing strategies for millionaire success, there are crucial truths I couldn’t say enough: start with the end in mind; create a business to sell it, not run it indefinitely. Create systems that can be imitated and duplicated. Increase its value and worth. Sell high!

As redundant as it seems, those words never get tired to me. It’s part of my gospel. I’m talking about creating a business with the full thought, knowledge and intention that you won’t be running it one day. How powerful is that intention? It’s the difference between being a poor business owner who gets by and a rich business owner who isn’t working anymore. He or she is doing exactly what he or she wants and intends to do.” Read the rest here

Comments