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Like people, businesses are supposed to grow, and with it comes change. Unfortunately, most businesses are run according to what the owner wants and not what it needs.
The Technician who gets to run the company wants the opposite. Instead of growth and change, he merely wants a place to go to work free from a boss. This spells doom for the business.
Understanding the three phases of a business’s growth is key to discovering why most small businesses fail and making sure that yours thrive.
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IN THE BEGINNING, YOU, as the Technician, think that nothing is too much for your business to ask. You work 10 to 16 hours a day, every single day. Your new business consumes you and you are totally invested in keeping it alive. You’re not just doing the work you know how to do, but also the ones that you don’t.
In its Infancy, the business and the owner are one. There would be no business if the owner were removed. Therefore, you are the business.
If you’re lucky, all your work will begin to pay off soon. Customers are not just coming back, but they’re bringing in their friends as well. People keep coming.
Then you’ll realize that you’re falling behind. More customers means more work to be done than you can handle. Inevitably, the Master Juggler begins to drop some of the balls.
The only thing you can do is to put in more time and energy into your new business. You work at home until late at night, and you need to wake up earlier than usual so you can work immediately. Even on the weekends, when you’re supposed to rest your mind, you are busy making sense out of the mess you found yourself in. Yet, you keep on dropping more balls.
Suddenly, you realize that you didn’t get rid of your Boss. You only created a new one in the form of your business.
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INFANCY ENDS WHEN YOU realize that your business has to change for it to survive. Most business failures take place when this happens. Most of the Technicians walk away from their business. Only the few who didn’t, go on to Adolescence.
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NOTHING IS WRONG WITH being a Technician. What’s wrong is when he owns a business. The entrepreneurial and strategic work – work that the Technician is not doing - is what will lead a business to move forward. When the Technician consumes the other two personalities, he is not building a great small business, but a complicated, unsatisfying, and demeaning job.
If a Technician wants to work in a business, he should work in somebody else’s business, and not in his own. Being the doer, he will create a business that can only run with him doing the work. A business that depends on you is not a business. It is a job.
