Blog | Entrepreneurship

The Entrepreneur Controlling Mindset

Here at Rich Dad we have decided that September is Entrepreneur Month. This month we are going to focus on entrepreneurship and teaching entrepreneurship to you. One of the things that plagues entrepreneurs is their controlling mindset.

To grow past being a self-employed individual who merely has a job work for him/herself, you must learn how to manage your time and delegate. Until you learn this, your company will never grow and you’ll never be free.

This is often the make-or-break issue with entrepreneurs. The world is full of would-be entrepreneurs who create businesses that are wonderful, as long as they’re operating on a scale so small that the entrepreneur can personally control every aspect of the business. But there are very few entrepreneurs who grasp how to design their tiny little business model so it can be multiplied and replicated many times over without their direct participation.

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Last week I mentioned a young man I met named Matt Clark. Matt has built two multi-million dollar companies from scratch and he is not even thirty yet. Matt knows that time is everything as an entrepreneur, so you’d better learn to make the most of it.

As an entrepreneur, one of the hardest things is deciding what task you need to complete everyday. If you do not learn to delegate as much as possible you will become the bottleneck at your company. What that means is since everything must flow through you, and one person can’t do everything, your company will get clogged at the point where everything touches you. Instead of being the leader and visionary, you will be the one preventing growth.

Your job as an entrepreneur is to lead. That means you have others who are doing. Entrepreneurs need to be generalists. We specialize in nothing. Our job is to be hands off as much as possible so that we can lead and maintain the vision.

So how do you decide what to do each day?

Matt offers us his strategy for evaluating what needs to be done each day. He says there are three words that will give the entrepreneur more time:

1. Eliminate
2. Automate
3. Delegate

Matt says, “Whenever you’re getting ready to hunker down with a business-related task in front of you and ‘just get it done’, STOP.

First, think: Can this task be eliminated? (Is it really important?)

Second, if it cannot be eliminated (it is vital to your business), think: Can it be automated? (Are you doing something manually that can be automated via technology?)

Third, if the task cannot be automated, think: Can it be delegated? (Am I the person who HAS to do this?)

Ask yourself these three questions every single day. As entrepreneurs, we often waste hours of time just doing STUFF so that it will get done, since we know the weight is on our shoulders. But, there are only so many hours in the day and you cannot continually stack on the WRONG activities…”

Now that you’ve cleared some time to work on productive activities in your business, what do you do? The answer is, grow the business. You do this by seeking opportunities, keeping your team focused, continuously providing the vision, and leading.

As a generalist you know a little about everything. You know just enough to measure each individual’s success and to ask the right questions to get an individual back on task and focused. As Matt says, “As an entrepreneur, your job is to create a profitable business. Everything else is secondary and cannot be accomplished without that one goal.”

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