In recent weeks I have written about the idea of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There in your business, and how it is important to be aware that the things you did when you first launched your business may no longer be working for you as you try to grow and scale your business. Not only will the tactics and activities that got you started not get you to your next level, but the mindset that got you started will not take you where you want to go. Now it’s time to take a dive deep into the idea of leveraging your resources instead of simply using or managing them. This applies not just your marketing, but also your time, money, team, and the network of who you know.
Money Beliefs Across SocioEconomic Levels
Before we really dig into how to leverage different parts of your business, I want to help you understand an idea of how different socioeconomic levels view money, and how that applies to your entrepreneurial efforts. This is not a judgemental view, but rather an academic explanation that I learned while earning my MBA.
At lower socioeconomic levels, money is viewed as something to be earned and spent. You make money to spend money. You have a job so that you can earn money to purchase the things that you need. You earn $1 to spend $1. You go to work in order to buy groceries and pay the bills.
In the middle socioeconomic level, money is viewed as something to be managed. This is where you see 401Ks, savings accounts, and some investments. In this mid-range, people spend a lot of time managing their money, moving the pieces around to get the best interest rates on their investments and the lowest rates on their debt. They have moved beyond earning $1 so that they can spend $1, but all of the energy is around how to manage that money to get the most out of each $1.
At the highest socioeconomic level, money is viewed as something to be leveraged. The purpose of money is to make more money. It is to be invested into other businesses, and higher-stakes opportunities. The rewards are potentially greater, and so are the risks. This idea that money exists to be leveraged is why you hear large companies or very wealthy people declaring bankruptcy without an emotional attachment to it. They truly do not have an emotional attachment to money, because they believe that it exists to be used and leveraged in these very ways.
With this mindset, all of the tools that give you money – or access to money – are just that: tools to leverage money. If there is a loss of money, they know they can leverage their resources and earn more.
I share this so that we can keep this concept as a reference as we talk about the things that you can leverage to move from solopreneur to business owner. In order to make this shift, you have to take the same approach that money, time, your team, and your network are to be leveraged instead of just managed.
What Can You Leverage In Your Business?
Leverage Your Team
Are you hiring, training, and growing a team that can manage itself with minimal guidance instead of needing you to micromanage everything? I get asked all the time about how I developed my amazing team that does things without me. In fact, I often joke that they grow despite me, not because of me. The truth is that I have done this by creating a culture that is both enjoyable and performance based at the same time. When you hire people who are performance based, who enjoy what they are doing, and then you get out of their way, the magic happens.
The biggest problem that I see is that most people won’t get out of the way. They refuse to move from manager to business owner. I understand that it is scary to give up control of so many things, but that’s what it takes to move from managing your team to leveraging your team.
One of the greatest pieces of advice that I received was back when I was in the corporate world: if someone can do something 80 percent as well as you can do it, let them do it. Nobody is going to ever love your business as much as you do, but if they are 80 percent of the way there, let them go for it.
Leverage Your Network
When I first started my business, I did so much networking just to create exposure. In my previous business, I went to 10 networking events each month, and spent a lot of time networking one-on-one with anyone who would listen. Now I am much more strategic in leveraging my network. I will no longer spend a lot of time with “just anyone who will listen to me” because it’s not the best use of my time, and honestly, it’s not their best use of their time either.
As your business grows, and you make the shift from solopreneur to business owner, it is important to be strategic in terms of who you spend your time with, as well as who you partner with, and where you are networking. It becomes important to level up your personal network and your business network so that you can leverage those relationships that help you grow, instead of just making as many connections as possible.
Leverage Your Time
Have you heard the old idiom, time is money? In the socioeconomic views about money that I shared, we talked about the idea of earning $1 to spend $1. When it comes to leveraging your time, your hours are as valuable as money. You can trade your hours for something with a small value, or you can leverage your hours for something with a high value.
In the beginning, we trade our hours for a small amount of exposure. We are so excited to share our vision and to have some sales and clients, that those efforts are worth it. Then, in what I like to call the Messy Middle of business growth, things become similar to the middle class view of money, in that time is to be managed. You may have hired a VA or a social media manager, but you are still managing everything. Even though you have help, you are still in charge of everything.
This is where it falls apart for a lot of people, because this is where it gets really hard. You’re making money, but you’re spending more money, and it’s all taking more time. And in many instances you feel that you are completely out of hours available to you and you’re starting to wonder how you are supposed to grow a business. And if it will always be this hard.
The goal is to elevate our use of time to be more in line with the top socioeconomic view of money. You have to move to leveraging your time. How can you leverage your time that will make the difference for your business? What things can only you do, and what things can your team handle without a lot of guidance? We often lie to ourselves and think that nobody else can do some things, when it’s probably not true. You have to get really, really judicious with this idea of what is the only thing that we can do.
Leveraging Your Money
Are you spending and investing your money back into your business in a way that is helping you leverage your team, your marketing, and your time? If your money is not giving you more of those things, it is time to look at how you are spending your money. It can be tempting to want to pay yourself more while you are still growing, but by investing that money back into your business, you can reach an even higher level of income.
I use a lot of litmus tests, or questions that I ask myself, as I am making decisions in my business. One of the most helpful groups of questions for me is when I tie my decisions back to the concept of socioeconomic levels: that in the beginning, it’s making money to spend money, in the middle, it’s believing that money is to be managed, and at the highest point of growing my business, it’s leveraging money, so that I am investing in things that will save time and help me earn more money. These litmus tests help me quickly realize if I am on the right path, so that I can have check-points as I make decisions.
A Leveraging Mindset
As you are making your decisions for your business, ask yourself: am I trading dollars for hours? Am I spending way too much time managing everything? Am I networking in places where I meet the best connections? Is what I am about to do really moving me to a place where I am leveraging my resources?
I have been talking and writing about this a lot lately because I absolutely believe that it is true. Going from solopreneur to business owner is much harder than launching your business in the first place. When you first launch, it’s to do the thing the business does because you like it and you are good at it. But becoming a business owner is a completely different skill set than what you may have tapped into when you first launched your business.
If you truly want to create the business that you want for yourself – and the life that you want for yourself – this is where we need to move. As I am sure you’ve realized by doing your own financial numbers, most solopreneur businesses don’t allow that solopreneur to earn the type of money that they want to earn. Leveraging your resources – time, money, team, and network – is really the way for you to create the business and life of your dreams.
