Step Back

Take a few days, or even a few weeks, to step back from your business. Assess what you love about your business (or what you used to love and enjoy). Explore what you dislike about your business too. For example, maybe you’re a service provider and you used to enjoy your clients but your new clients are difficult and not enjoyable to work with. Or perhaps your desire to be a service provider has waned.

Knowing what you like about your business, and what you don’t like, can help you create a plan to modify it to fit your changing needs.

Embrace What You Love

Often, regaining or retaining your passion for your business means focusing on the tasks that you enjoy and finding ways to eliminate the rest. If you find that your passion is wavering, perhaps it’s because you’re doing too many tasks that you dislike.

Focus again on what you love and use that brilliant entrepreneurial mind of yours to find ways to get rid of the rest. It may mean modifying your systems so some tasks are no longer necessary. It may mean automating something or hiring outside help. Trust that when you’re able to focus on what you love, your passion will be sustained.

A Little Gratitude Goes a Long Way

It’s amazing what a little gratitude can do for the spirit. And when you’re an entrepreneur there are so many things to be grateful for. You’re the boss. You’re in control of your financial future. You get to spend your days doing something that you love. Whenever you feel your passion disappearing and procrastination setting in, think about all of the wonderful things you get to experience by owning your own business. It’s a quick and easy way to gain perspective and appreciation for your business.

Don’t Be Afraid to Make Changes

Finally, remember that sometimes maintaining passion for your business is about keeping things interesting. If you’ve found yourself in a rut, consider how you can improve or change your business to keep the fires burning. Constantly striving to provide better products or services, or to make more money, is a great way to stay motivated and enthusiastic.

You own your own business and that gives you the power to control your day to day destiny. If you find that you’re feeling unenthusiastic about your business, take action to make a change. You already know you’re capable of great things.

This might seem non-sensical at first. Afterall, the client is the one paying you, so shouldn’t they have complete control? The simple answer is no, and here’s why. Quite often, clients don’t know exactly what they want, and quite often, they have no idea what kind of time or effort goes into the services you provide.

This means that if you constantly defer to the client to ask them what they’d like over the course of your project, you may find yourself giving them choices that they don’t need to be making, and aren’t really necessarily capable of making. This can turn an otherwise simple project into a nightmare.

If you’re working on an hourly basis, then clients making changes left right and center might not be a big deal since the more changes they make, the more hours you’ll bill. However, if you’re working on a per project basis, then the fewer changes and alterations you have, the better. And this means that if you can keep as much control over the details of the project as possible, you’ll end up having to deal with far less revisions.

The reality is, if you defer to the client for input on every small detail, they’ll probably end up asking for things that might be outside the scope of the price you quoted or impossible due to time restrictions. However, had you just made those decisions yourself, you’d never have had to deal with that at all.

Always make sure that everything that you’re going to deliver and all details are worked out and carved in stone contractually before you start a project. If your client doesn’t know exactly what they want, then either have them think harder about their requirements, or make it very clear to them that further revisions or changes will be billed on top of the initial price.

Some clients will try to work you to death for the least amount of money possible, and these aren’t the kind of clients you want to deal with. Avoid that problem by making sure that any time a project isn’t clearly defined from the start, that the clients understand that either a) creative control is in your hands or b) that they have the option of asking for revisions, but they will be billed for any changes that require extra time or work.

Firstly, while debt may seem expensive, the cost of borrowing can be, for the most part, considered a short-term cost, at least for start-ups. The debt you’ll be taking on will not likely be on a term of more than a few years. On the other hand, equity financing is forever. When you sell someone part of your business, it’s for good. The only way you can get that back is to buy it back. Consider that and you may come to realize that equity financing can in fact be far more expensive than debt financing when you look at the long term.

If you assume you can build a successful business (a big assumption for most, but humour me), then looking at the cost across the lifetime of your business paints a very different picture than the short term view. In the long term, years after you’ve become successful, that debt you took on to get off the ground will be a distant memory. On the other hand, that chunk of the business you sold will still be in someone else’s pocket, and they’ll have a claim to a piece of your profit pie year in and year out.

Secondly, debt financing leaves control of your business in your hands. You’re responsible to repay that debt, plus the interest, but the lenders generally won’t get in your hair about how you run your business (unless things get really bad). This is a huge advantage. When you raise capital by selling equity, you now have a responsibility to a shareholder or partner. And if that shareholder takes on a large chunk of ownership, you can bet they’re going to want to have a say in how things get done. Rightfully so, too! They’ve put their own money on the line, and they deserve a voice in how things get done.

This might not sound so bad, and in some cases it isn’t, but in some cases, it can be awful. You may take on an investor who you soon find out doesn’t share your vision, decides they don’t believe in your abilities, or are just a general pain in the ass. And you’ll be fully accountable to that pain in the ass! Debt financing on the other hand doesn’t bring with it the possibility of losing control of your own company.

So when is equity financing a good way to go? Check out Part Three of Debt vs. Equity to find out!