Using Leverage – Ways to Become Rich
Today I’d like to talk to you about a subject that pretty much everyone that is in business or claims to be an entrepreneur has heard of, most people talk about, but only a small select few actually practice. That’s the topic of leverage. When I’m speaking of leverage I’m talking about any thing, person or system that allows for you to be able to multiply the scope and the power and the impact of the efforts that you are using to build your business.
Some of the more commonly known about forms of leverage can range anywhere from having employees or outsourcing to contractors, collecting intellectual properties like residuals on music or books that you’ve written, building sales teams like insurance or network marketing. All of these are different forms of leverage. Being able to accrue interest on an investment; these are all things that allow you to increase your bottom line from effort that you don’t personally have to put in.
Most business people have read, or claim to have read, Michael Gerber’s eBook where he talks about making sure you’re working on your business and not in your business. But when I really look at most people who have failed in business, and when I even look back into the failures that I’ve had in business, I see leverage is one of the top things that people never really master, they just talk about and it ends up killing them in their success.
I know that personally I ended up spending an extra three to five years working in corporate America that I would not have had to endure at all had I really taken this principle to heart earlier on. I built a business system that, quite frankly, needed way too much of my involvement.
One of the things that I learned along the way from a couple of mentors is that in your business, no matter what you may have to do to get it started because in the beginning of your business you may have to do a lot just to save money and be able to get it off the ground.
Once you get the slightest bit of traction, as soon as you possibly can, you want to begin delegating and taking tasks off of your plate. As the business owner your main role is to really be the visionary that leads the direction of where your company is going, not the executor that makes sure that everything is happening.
So whether that is from building a sales team for yourself or going to someone like and outsourcing other people to do work for you or creating systems, whether they be online or otherwise, something that can do a lot of the work for you; the day to day tasks of your business.
Because anytime you find yourself intimately involved in the day to day operation of a business you are not, at that point, exercising leverage and you are not working on your business and being a business owner. You’re being an employee of your own business and you really want to avoid that. So I would say whatever business that you have right now, write the whole thing out.
Write the entire system, all of the things that needs to be done and begin to check off things and earmark certain tasks and obligations that you can outsource to other people or pay people a small hourly wage, or you can maybe even have a computer to do for you so that you don’t have to do those things.
So make sure that you are infusing leverage into whatever it is that you do and you will not only be more sane and have more of your time for you to able to make more money, and you will free up even more time where you can look at newer and better opportunities.