Ever had one of those days when you absolutely knew you should have stayed in bed? Why didn’t you?

After having a shocker a few weeks ago, my brother asked me a simple question. “Will your business fail if you take the rest of the day off?”

There are 2 answers to this question. The first answer is “YES”. But then surely the business owns us – not the other way round? Unless we take steps to tame this entrepreneurial beast, then how will we ever have a life? How can we sell a business that is so dependent on our own individual efforts that we have to sell ourselves with it? Where is the exit strategy for the day we want to retire?

Most of us are bogged down with a deep guilt about our businesses. We’re uncomfortable being away from the beast for too long. Maybe it’s the way we were taught – that we have to work hard to prosper. Maybe it’s because we’re afraid it’s really going to stop breathing. [A little like the first months as a new parent when you check the baby every few hours – net ingeval!]

Maybe the reason lies in the way most of us started out. Most of us didn’t make the choice to start our own businesses. It was made for us when we were fired, or retrenched, or left school and couldn’t find a job, or were divorced and couldn’t find anything else to support ourselves. And when we start out from such a pathetic base we want to spend every day just apologising for being alive.

It’s taken me exactly 10 years to realise how much I was affected by the closure of my first business in 1992. I have spent almost every day apologising for it. That business failure, and the subsequent challenges, has impacted on every single aspect of my business and personal life since. I have allowed myself to continually be abused by ‘partners’, prospects, clients, and ‘friends’. I know this because I took a few days off this week to think about my future – and felt guilty most of every day because I wasn’t ‘working’.

This guilt ensures that even when we have nothing to do, we will still potter around the business. This not only distresses the staff [most of whom just want to get on with their jobs without interference] but it also distresses us as well. We start to see minor blemishes in the perfection of our operations. And since we have some spare time right now we start to fiddle! Bad move – that spare time should be spent at the nearest coffee shop/bar/game farm thinking about how to work less while getting more done.

This same guilt ensures that we will work longer hours than any employee. Each of us is our own worst boss! We want to lead by example – even though we feel martyred much of the time. Surely our employees would rather know that someone is actually guiding the ship of enterprise towards port than messing about in the engine room shoveling coal? It doesn’t matter that we captains of industry might be the best coal shovelers on earth – we’re also by far the most expensive coal shovelers. We’re being paid to think – not work! [So why do we all still have so much difficulty finding the time to think.]

The other answer to that initial question is "NO". Which begs the original question. “Will your business fail if you take today off?” So, why don’t you head off for some coffee and a few hours of thought? After all, that is what you’re paying yourself for, isn’t it?

© Peter Carruthers, www.petesweekly.co.za

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