When you’re riding the tiger of your small, amazing business, in the throes of rapid expansion, and especially when you start attracting clients who are much bigger than you, it’s all too easy to become completely subsumed by the business. You eat it, drink it, sleep it, and expect your team to do likewise.

Your business becomes your bubble.

This can be fine for a little while. The problem comes when living in the bubble becomes a habit. When you no longer step out of it to see what’s happening in the world, what opportunities there are, what changes are coming. Where the people who can help you are.

This happens because in the beginning you are your business, even if you have several people working with you. Changing the business means changing you. Which is scary, even if you want to do it.

The answer is counter-intuitive. Before you take on that big, important client; before you open that third branch, embed ‘you’ into the business so firmly that it can never let go of it.  Not even as it grows.

By ‘you’ I don’t mean your physical self, but your vision, values and way of doing things. That’s what drove you to set the business up, and it’s what drives you to keep riding it, even when it feels like a tiger.

That’s what makes your business uniquely amazing. And that’s what you do not want to lose.

By embedding ‘you’, actually ‘we’ – because by now ‘you’ isn’t only you, it’s also your team – into the fabric of your business, building it into the way it works, day to day, you release yourself and your team from the necessity of being there all the time. Because everyone becomes a ‘boss’, able to run the business as if they were you.

And that means you can safely leave this bubble to explore and play with new ones.

Don’t wait until you’re forced to leave your bubble. Get ready to pop it on purpose.

Ask me how.

HT to Bev Costoya for the prompt.