Are you a Business Owner or are you owned by your business?

Are you a leader of your business who determines the destination and leads others along the set path to success and prosperity? Or are you merely the most senior employee working for your own business?

From personal experience of working with entrepreneurs and executives, these who spend more than 20% of their time doing technical work are not creating a self sustainable business, but simply trying to survive.

So which one are you: Survivor or Prosperer?

At the end of the day every technical skill in the modern age of computers and internet can either be outsourced or computerised for the price that is half or less of what it costs most of the business owners who actually do technical work themselves.

And I dare to estimate that by the year 2012 most of the technical work will either be outsourced for a much cheaper price or completely computerised… hence the ever increasing popularity of sites like elance.com where technical work that in most modern countries usually costs in excess of $30-$300 per hour on such sites can be outsources for as little as $5 per hour with option to pay upon completion and only if customer is satisfied!

Cheap with Guaranteed quality! Will you be able to compete with that when the times comes?

The fact of the matter is if you are baking, making, cleaning, servicing, selling, maintaining, quoting and paying, then you do NOT own a business, your Business Owns you!

While there is nothing wrong with doing technical jobs in your business, but it’s only Ok as long as it’s your choice!

On this note, I invite you to conduct a quick litmus test…

Call your office right now and tell your staff that you won’t be coming in today, because you decided to take few weeks off to travel around Europe. If by the time you get back and your business has not been turned in to a parking lot, then you can confidently say that you are on par with businesses destined for success.

However, if being even as much as a day away from running of your business would cause irreversible damage, causing your employees (if you have any) to hide in a corner in a fetal position sucking on their thumbs then maybe it’s time to take a step back and look at the direction of where your business is going and where are you leading it?!

And while you at it, take a quick glance in a mirror and see if the same passionate person who started your business is staring back? If not then maybe it’s time to take a day off, sit back with a warm drink in your hands and your feet up on a coffee table and read Emyth while pondering how to reclaim your business so that YOU are a Business Owner and not Owned by your business.

Hope you’ll enjoy your weekend and more so weeks to come.

Anatoly.