Does Geoff own a business or has he simply bought himself a job?
An article by Jim Connolly
As anyone who has attended one of my seminars will already know, I start the day by getting the delegates to introduce themselves. Geoff came to one of my seminars back in 2005 and introduced himself like this;

“My name is Geoff and I am not sure if I am the Managing Director of a company or if I have simply bought myself a job – I’m hoping as today progresses, that Jim will tell me. Thank you.”

During the morning break, I spoke with Geoff about his interesting introduction and he expanded a little. He explained that he had set up an IT maintenance business. He worked around 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, travelling from business to business fixing various IT problems for his clients; before coming back to the office for an hour or two to do the paperwork. He went into business for himself because he wanted the freedom, lifestyle and financial rewards that come from owning a business.

What Geoff realised was that his business was so massively reliant on him physically being there, that he actually had less freedom than when he worked as a salaried employee!

His income was higher, but his quality of life was lower; with him working an additional 5 or 10 hours each week and having to deal with the day to day running of a business as well as providing his core services. In the 2 years since he formed his company, he had not taken a holiday. During the seminar, Geoff was able to establish what he needed to do in order to get the lifestyle and rewards he wanted – but that’s not why I am sharing this with you.

In my experience, most people who are self-employed or have the title CEO or Managing Director are in a similar position to Geoff. They work long hours for a business that requires them to be there most, if not all of the time. However, when you study people who are truly successful in business, with the lifestyle and income they want, you see a very different picture.

These people have time each week to ‘smell the roses’. They enjoy regular holidays with their families and have interests outside work that they engage in. They recharge their mental and physical batteries regularly, which makes them vastly more effective in their business. Their business works for them.

These truly successful businesspeople either own walk-away businesses (I’ll explain that in a moment) or they have good quality people they can delegate to.

I was first introduced to the concept of a ‘walk-away’ business in New York, way back in the late 1980’s. A lady introduced herself to me at a Wal-Mart store and tried to ‘sign me up’ as a distributor for one of the better-known Multi-level Marketing Schemes. Although I politely said “no thank you,” I was intrigued. A walk-away business is one where you can make money whilst you sleep or are in the gym or are on holiday. They require very little of your time once they are established (usually 5 or 10 hours a week or less).

Examples of walk-away businesses include this web site
On this site you can buy audio programmes that are downloaded onto your computer and can then be listened to on any device in your home. This business requires me to hold no stock, there is no packaging, no postage or couriers involved. There are no returns and the buyer gets their product in perfect condition in minutes - not days or weeks. The invoicing is fully automated - I literally check my inbox every evening and look at how much money I made that day.

Authors also earn walk away income. After writing their book they get a residual income from on-going sales of that book. Premium rate telephone services; where the caller pays to listen to what they consider to be valuable, recorded information is another example. The list is huge and growing every day. If you do not already own a walk-away business, this just might be a great time to look into it.

If you are already in business and your company is not one you can develop into a walk-away business, there is an alternative with a proven track record.

Employ someone specifically to handle those time-consuming activities that currently tie-up big chunks of your time; BUT, which another person could be trained to do. With the correct checks and balances in place, you can still manage those tasks without being tied to them and the business. One word of caution here. Whenever recruiting for your business, use a recruitment agency. Just as you would not try to represent your business in court without professional help, so you should seek professional help with recruitment - especially for such an important position.

Ultimately, the success of any non walk-away business is a fusion of income AND lifestyle. It's easy to delegate those tasks that are 'low-level' but letting go and delegating the more involved tasks within a business is often far more difficult. Our level of success will always be capped by our willingness (or otherwise) to delegate. How far would Richard Branson have got, had he not surrounded himself with good people to delegate important tasks to?

To your success,

Jim Connolly
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