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Last month, I told you how I moved away from the deck. This month, I want to take the role of devil’s advocate: How can I return to the deck again?
If you’ve ever read Michael Gerber’s business book, The E-Myth, then you know that most of us who opened martial arts schools were technical experts having an entrepreneurial seizure. Your businesses grew (assuming that you evolved along with it and were responsive to the role changes that were required), you’re still a technician, but now you’re sitting in the office being a business strategist. Add to the mix that you aren’t doing what you feel is your core skill, and you have a recipe for stress and possible business failure. It’s no wonder that you feel as though you’re betraying the reason you opened the business in the first place.
I opened my business because it was an integral step in my martial arts journey. From my perspective, being a business owner is part of the learning curve of being a martial artist.
It’s my contention that my responsibility is to keep training and learning both in the martial arts and in my business. My long-term martial goal is to be healthy and active on the mat doing judo and jiu-jitsu into my seventies. My long-term business goal is to create a business that doesn’t need me to run like a well-oiled machine that (without me present) has at its core a sense of gratitude and therefore routinely exceeds the expectations of its clients in all areas of performance. So how do I achieve these seemingly contradictory goals?
Obviously, I need to keep growing as a martial artist and as a business owner. The key word here is “growing.” Growing as a martial artist or as a business owner does not imply that I have to do everything. I am responsible for learning, planning, delegating and leading. I’m not the person on the deck, teaching all the classes, or the manager in the office, doing all the functions of the business. As I’ve cited in the last couple of columns: The strategist builds the vision, the tacticians embrace the vision and implement the plan.
Ultimately, it’s all about freedom: Freedom of time, freedom of choice and of action. The more I “do,” the less time I have to “be.” This also means the less time I have to be a strategist. Let me explain. If I’m the one doing the job of running the business and teaching all the classes, I eventually cease to be a business owner. I become instead an overstressed, underpaid employee and I cease to be a martial artist. I become a hamster on a wheel, doing the same classes again and again. The more people I find who share my vision and can do what I do as well or better, the more time I have to improve my skills as a business owner and as a martial artist.
Equally, at the same time I have more time to help my employees and clients grow and reach their goals.
I was listening to an interview by Jay Abraham the other day and Jay talked about a gifted salesman who opened his own business. The salesman became the business manager and hired others to do the sales functions for him—and the business suffered, accordingly. For the salesman-turned-entrepreneur, the answer was to hire the best business executive he could find and return to the sales force. He owns the business and yet returned to the role of salesman doing what he loved simply because he had the wisdom to find the right niche for his skills and delegate everything else to competent specialists who love doing what they do.
So here’s the really cool part. If I really love the arts, then when I have delegated my business functions to skilled managers and my classes to gifted instructors, I can return to my deck in any capacity that I want! I’m not doing it any more because I have to do it. I’m doing it for the very reason I started: I simply love it. Seems to me that this is a win/win situation any way you slice it.
