What is a Business Owner?
When I ask people what they do, and they say they own a business, it doesn’t take long to realise that those people ‘own a job’. I don’t mean that as an insult – it’s a reality for so many small business owners, especially in the early years.
They are the people responsible for making the sales, answering the phone, doing the quotes, paying the bills and locking up at night. They are the marketing team, the admin team and sales reps.
If you’re a one-person operation, this isn’t just common, it’s often unavoidable. Bills need to be paid, and customers have to be served because that’s how you make a living and get food on the table. But the danger is tucked in there, too. If that’s all you ever do, you’re not owning the business; the business is owning you.
A business owner is someone who:
Builds systems so that the business can operate without them being present every moment.
Makes decisions based on long-term goals, not just on immediate survival.
Works on the business, not just in it.
Case Example: The Busy Café
It doesn’t mean you never do hands-on work because that might just happen to be your favourite part about your business, it just means you choose when you do it, because you’ve built the ability for others to handle it too.
A café I once worked with was drowning in success. He loved the stores, but he was working 70 hours a week, taking orders, arranging coffees, delivering food when the staff weren’t available.
He thought he was growing because the sales were up, but he couldn’t take a weekend off without the business coming to a halt. When we mapped his time, 90% of his week was operational and 10% was strategic.
The shift came when he hired an operations manager who documented his processes, putting it all into an operations manual and giving the staff clear decision-making guidelines. Within 3 months, he was able to step back from the chaos and start working on the growth of the business to new locations, a move that tripled the annual revenue.
Why This Matters For You
If you’re constantly stuck in daily tasks, you might feel productive, but you’re actually just maintaining and hanging on to what exists, not growing. You might be ok with that, but I would argue your role as a business owner is to guide the direction, make important decisions and design a business that doesn’t collapse without you. Even if you’re a solo operator, you can still automate parts of your business, outsource or delegate specialist tasks (like accounting and bookkeeping) and batch work to free up thinking time.
