Do you own a business or just a job?

Last week, we talked about how we, as entrepreneurs, don’t know any other life than creating and building businesses.

I shared my story of climbing out of deep debt to turn a profit in one year, only to find my marriage and health in shambles.

This may come as a surprise, but I wouldn’t have traded these experiences for anything because I now have a successful framework for building the machine, not being the business..

This has helped me achieve Optionality.

This week, I’m going to break down what I mean by this term – and share the principles of optionality – to help you take the framework and scale to exit.

Do you have a business or a job?

Here’s how most businesses work:

Entrepreneur + Business = Success

While this equation is correct, it is also sad.

If you remove the entrepreneur from the equation, the business dies along with the success and profit that it creates.

In essence, most entrepreneurs don’t own a business, they have a job.

The business owns them.

If the business cannot exist without them, they have not built a business… They are the business.

This is what I escaped from.

I love my business, our employees, and our clients, but I wanted to remove myself from the equation.

I didn’t want to close down or sell the business yet, but I wanted to build new things, and spend energy on new endeavors.

I needed an option that didn’t require me in the equation.

I wanted to see growth, but wanted to detach my time and energy from the outcome.

So I built a system that created this for me with a new kind of equation:

This is how I define Owner Optionality:

You + Business = Success

Easier said than done, but my goal is to show you how to make this a reality faster and easier than you think is possible.

What Optionality gives you

Before we get into how to achieve Optionality, I want to share what it creates for you.

At its core, when you detach yourself from the business and it continues to grow this increases three things for every entrepreneur:

Confidence: You know the business will grow and deliver your vision without requiring your time.

Resources: Your business creates profit, assets and expertise to help you compound the areas of your life that are most important.

Energy: You spend your time on things that create energy, not consume it.

This is the dream state of every owner.

You can exit and hold, sell the business or simply focus on the areas that bring you energy.

Why Optionality is the goal

What I’ve found is that most entrepreneurs feel stuck.

Even if their business is profitable, they don’t know how to escape what they’ve built and believe the only way out is more growth.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Yes, growth will help you hire more talent and realize more profits but it doesn’t solve the core issue…

Growth isn’t a solution, it’s an outcome.

Why Optionality matters

I started sharing about optionality because I believe the biggest issues the world is facing can be solved by entrepreneurs.

Throughout history, many of the world's greatest challenges have been solved by entrepreneurs.

Their ability to create solutions from nothing is needed now more than ever.

The problem is that most entrepreneurs sacrifice themselves on the altars of their business.

They give everything to keep their dreams alive, and don’t know how to step away without it dying.

This is why it’s my mission to help more entrepreneurs achieve Optionality.

In the next email I’m going to show you the three areas of your business that need to level up in order to scale to exit.

This is the exact process I used to scale to exit my business, and has worked for many other entrepreneurs as well.

Talk soon,

Zach

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