A rant about what a business is and why they are built, not grown.
Get work, do work, get paid, spend pay. Does that sound familiar?
That’s a job; that’s a life of trading time for money.
But it’s also the life of many business owners who have just created a job for themselves. The only difference is they’re working for themselves instead of someone else. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as you’re happy trading time for money, ad infinitum.
But if you want more than a job, you’ve got to build something.
You can grow a business to a million dollars in revenue, and it still be a job.
A proper business is different. A real business doesn’t use you; it leverages you.
Instead of trading an hour for $30, it helps you trade your hours for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
When you work for yourself, you can only ever 1x your inputs (time). A great business can 10 or 100x your inputs. That is leverage.
And you create that leverage by combining resources, systems, intellectual property, software, and so on in unique ways to create something a market wants.
A machine that consistently makes that happen, with or without your input, is a business. And it is built, not grown.
People say Steve Jobs was a great entrepreneur because he designed useful products. That’s not the whole truth. Steve Jobs was a great entrepreneur because he built a great business.
Key Takeaway: Businesses are machines that combine inputs in unique combinations to produce more valuable outputs than the sum of their parts. In this case, 1 + 1 = >2.