LIFEBLOOD

I don’t know about you, but I’m obsessed with money. I don’t know a business owner who isn’t.

We wake up thinking about money. We measure every opportunity on how much revenue it will generate. We squawk about every dollar spent in our organizations. We don’t count sheep in our sleep, we count receivables.

Even if money isn’t our number one motivator, we all reach a point in the life of our businesses when money is the first thing on our minds when we wake up and the last thought drifting through our brains when we fall asleep at night.

When we’ve got money, we’re successful. When we don’t have money, we’re a failure.

If we trust Uncle Sam’s numbers, almost 600,000 businesses fail every year. What’s responsible for that number? A Dun & Bradstreet report from some years ago listed 14 common causes for business failure; the most common causes could be traced back to money. They centered around pricing, lack of capital, debt, lifestyle expenses and lack of knowledge about financial record-keeping and decision-making. Even causes not directly linked to money certainly link indirectly: lack of planning and no knowledge of suppliers.

Translation: these business owners made mistakes around money. The lifeblood of the businesses dried up, for any of a number of reasons that all come down to money.

Sooner or later, no matter what our original motives or dreams, the reality of business ownership is this: If we’re not in it for the money, we won’t be in it for long.

So for all of our obsessing about money, we’re still making a lot of bad choices. I see it every day in my work with businesses owners. My own business supports business owners who want to cross the chasm that separates the great idea from the great enterprise. What drives business owners through my door? Money. They don’t have enough of it. The Overhead Monster gobbles it up. The business leaks it. Their leaders demand more of it. They’ve figured out how to make a lot of it, but the effort to keep it up is killing them.

Inevitably, they’ve made wrong choices about the use of the lifeblood of their companies.

Draining the lifeblood of a business starts with a choice that seems pretty straightforward, maybe even pretty harmless. The choice is often unconscious. The difference between owners who build wealth and those who struggle is frequently determined by their answer to one question: Will I use this business to foster a certain lifestyle today, or will I use it to build true wealth for the future?

What about you? Whether you know it or not, you’ve answered that question. Do you even know your answer, and the consequences it implies?

Our answer to that question places us in one of two camps. We are either the Lifestyle Owner or the Business Wealth Builder.

Which are you? And how does that affect your future, the legacy value of your business, and the future of the people you love?