Competence – How to Protect Yourself From Building a Business You Hate

If You Hate it When It’s Small…

“If you hate it when it’s small, don’t grow it big. You’ll just hate it more as it gets bigger.” – Taylor Welch

One of the most criminally stupid things you can do is scale a business that you don’t even like.

Somewhere in the span of the last decade or so, probably as a result of the “hustle culture” phenomenon, this idea has taken root that building a business is hard – and therefore it cannot also be fun.

This resulted in a generation of business owners who are actively working every day on a business that gives them zero energy… running a hundred miles an hour toward burnout, but not reversing course because (on the surface at least) the business is succeeding.

Inside The Wealthy Consultant, we encounter business owners like this DAILY. We talk to them, we help them, and we send them back out into the world – ready to make it a happier and better place.

How? We start by addressing the thing that is actually keeping them stuck.

(Spoiler alert: It’s pretty much never their business… it’s what we’re about to cover next.)

Competence and Compromise

Most business owners who have “accidentally” built a business that is killing them slowly from the inside out, are doing so because of incompetence.

Incompetence is not the same as stupidity, even though in modern culture they’re often used interchangeably.

Let’s start by defining competence. It comes in all different shapes and sizes, so let’s simplify it down to this:

The ability to get what you want, how and when you want it.

The issue with competence when it comes to business ownership, is that relatively few business owners actually have a healthy, working idea of what they WANT.

When you don’t have a clear vision of exactly what you want, you will gladly accept substitutions. This is called compromise – making a decision that feels right in the immediate, but jeopardizes your future.

Make enough unworthy compromises in enough areas of your life and business, and pretty soon you forget what it was you were building toward in the first place.

This is incompetence. Lack of clarity.

Margin Heals All Wounds

Okay so we lack clarity. As a result, we’ve started building businesses we don’t like, and which we then feel compelled to scale to large sizes.

Yuck. Right?

What’s the solution?

It starts with margin.

If you control your mind, you control your world. But this kind of deep work can only be accomplished with some distance. Running around like a bat out of hell is a form of energy that leaves little room for strategic invention.

This is a hard pill to swallow if you’re still chasing the never ending merry-go-round of external validation. But you must get free.

Even better than getting rich is getting free.

Many people correlate them but they are not the same things.

When we built businesses that don’t fulfill us, we’re substituting money for freedom.

Take it from a group that has been to the top of “money mountain” and seen what’s up there… you don’t want to make this trade.

Get margin from your business, step back and reevaluate with some breathing room. Then get clarity on what you want.

We often start with some questions.

• What does my ideal business look like/sound like/smell like?
• Is the business I’m currently building THAT kind of business?
• What steps do I need to take to turn my business into that?

Get clear – then commit.