"You Are Not Your Business" - Useful Advice For Any Entrepreneur
“I am my business.”
Day 1 as a business owner is the start of a huge chapter in every entrepreneur’s journey.
If we choose to stick with it then over time we learn what it means to be a leader, a coordinator, an activator, and a visionary (sometimes all at once).
*pauses to drink from fire hose*
But owning a business is a big endeavor with a lot of responsibilities.
Plus, it requires you to access a whole new headspace as you find balance between passion, compromise, success, and chaos.
I’m not ashamed to say that when I registered my LLC in 2014 as a super senior at NC State University, I WAS my business.
Like many independent entrepreneurs there was no veil of professionalism or “as seen through my website” kind of system. It was just me. At age 21, you could find me:
Building websites for my friends/family
Selling music production & rap instrumentals to recording artists
Creating and selling custom clothing through PayPal
Dreaming about someday running a million dollar business
I didn’t begin with a big vision for toppling titans of industry or building a solution to a global problem.
I just began.
What’s the difference between “I’m successful” and “My business is successful”?
To a young entrepreneur there isn’t a huge difference between “I’m successful” and “my business is successful.” It can be hard to separate the two, especially during a time when we’re still defining our identity and stepping into our potential.
In my first two years as a business owner, I felt like a BOSS (and I mean that in the hip-hop / Rick Ross sense of the word, not the Bill Lumbergh / Office Space sense).
This was a time when I basically defined success by asking: “am I free to do whatever I want in this moment?”
Since I was newly graduated, paying my bills with income from my company, and I had a handful of regular clients who loved my work… the answer was usually yes.
I felt super successful, whether my business made $1000 or $5000 in a month. I was happy and I had the freedom to work creatively, pursue passions, and fall in love.
I was also headstrong and confident, and not only did I want to do everything at once - I felt like I actually could. I felt like I was cool, therefore my business was cool, and people would want to work with me for that.
Happy as I was at the time, I was quickly entering a mind state where I was ready to lay it all on the line to build a million dollar business.
If that meant burning the candle at both ends for days, months, or years at a time, it was an easy trade. I was ready for anything.
But when you’re ready to give it all in pursuit of a dream, you have to be smart about what you define as “success”.
Trying to define my idea of success is where I began to experience some confusion between “I am myself” and “I am my business”.
Define “success” for yourself or you’ll probably feel like a failure.
We each create our own definition of success.
This means that “I’m successful” is a mind state that we must cultivate and define for ourselves.
If we try to live and achieve by someone else’s definition of success then we’ll have a hard time feeling good about our achievements.
For a first generation college student, success might look like a degree and a great job after college.
For a musician, success might be brightening a hospital patient’s day with a song, or it could be going platinum with an album release.
For a hedge fund manager, it might be the chance to manage the most money they’ve ever handled before.
For those of us who consider ourselves to be self-made, success rarely comes with definitive traits.
It’s primarily a factor of answering questions like “What will make me happy?”, and “What kind of impact will this have?”.
Whether you want money, freedom, travel, sex, or something else, you have to define success on your own terms.
Plus, these things can vary from day to day… After all, we aren’t made of stone - we are humans in a constant state of personal evolution.
If success for me was being the richest person on Earth, then it’d be a pretty tough life in the day-to-day considering that:
a) I’ve got to beat people like Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett to feel successful, and
b) My success can only be measured by comparing myself to others.
However if success for me is being happy and having the freedom to pursue my passions and hang out with people I love… well that’s a different ball game altogether.
Freedom is a lifestyle choice.
Many entrepreneurs are lured into running their own business by the idea that the entrepreneur’s life is one of freedom & flexibility.
It can certainly be that way, but there are times when you’re really in the trenches with your ideas and that freedom that initially called to you can quickly be replaced with a crushing workload.
If you aren’t careful, it can be easy to fall for the bait-and-switch of buying in on the freedom and selling out for the dollar signs.
If you want most of your week free to pursue a passion like recording music, or remodeling houses, or whatever, then success might look like reaching a stage where you can do what you want without compromising your business.
For me it was a mistake as a young business owner to blend my lifestyle & financial goals under the singular umbrella of my business venture.
At the time, I wasn’t ready to handle them as separate things, but in hindsight I see I should have made the effort.
At the initial stages of my business, I just wanted to be happy.
I wanted time to record music, practice with my band, design clothes, hang out with my girlfriend, and tons more stuff.
Success was being happy, and I can safely say I crushed this portion of things.
But as I started to recognize how different my work was from other businesses, it went to my head a little bit. Ultimately, it was harder than I ever thought to scale my personal freedom and business revenue at the same time.
Fertile Soil / Primordial Soup
All that being said, there was something magical about the “I am my business” state of things.
As a creative entrepreneur, I felt like I was finally finding the primordial ooze that I could turn into my legacy.
I was the authentic creator.
I was basically everything that mattered to the business.
If someone wanted to work with me, it was because they wanted ME to do the work, not the BUSINESS.
There was very little business owner clout.
It was a matter of my personal brand and the flights of fancy I tackled as someone with an overactive imagination and an Employer Identification Number.
“My business is me.”
Around 12 months into running my business, I brought on my girlfriend Caroline Caldwell as a CMO/co-founder and we rebranded from Shep Bryan Designs to The Fold Creative.
We felt that with a fresh brand (and Caroline’s insane organizational abilities) we could have a much larger impact and generate real scalable revenue growth.
It’s around this time that my sense of self started to encompass my business.
Looking back on this now, this is definitely a no-no for me going forward.
My business was becoming ME in my head.
I could feel proud of it, or embarrassed by it. I could feel pensive or overcome with energy during meetings.
But it wasn’t a separate entity from me… it was me.
As a confident and outgoing person, I have a pretty strong frame.
I’ve always pulled others into my energy with a mix of vision, humor and excitement. Somewhere along the way, things got a little sideways.
Suddenly my frame shifted from thinking of myself as “an individual running a business” to thinking of myself as “a running business”.
Where I was once a man running a business, I became a business running a man.
Startup life and creative agency life made me into something I never really wanted to be. (An adult! hah… I kid.) I wanted to have bigger projects, more revenues, more team members, but in hindsight I think I wanted them for the wrong reasons.
Rather than wanting them for myself as an individual and getting excited about the impact I could have, I wanted them for my business.
I really want to try and put this contrast in high fidelity for you.
Wanting something for myself that I could achieve through my business is one thing.
But wanting something for a business because it’s the only thing you’re thinking about is not the recipe for success (or mental health).
Businesses evolve with the founders.
They evolve to address new customer needs.
They evolve to create faster growth.
They evolve to meet the personal needs of the team thats running the ship.
Sometimes it’s a quick evolution, out of necessity or revelation.
Other times it’s a longer metamorphosis – in a sense it’s like building train tracks to a new destination while you’re also riding on the train.
As a natural wordsmith, I’ve always been prone to obsessing over “the right words” for defining what I do.
They have to be perfect or no one will understand! These are the things I tell myself… confusing my songwriting perfectionism with the functional & concrete vocabulary needs of the business world.
The big problem here is things change.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to define what my business was over the years… the only problem was that I was trying to hit a moving target while in a moving vehicle with both pieces evolving at their own rates.
Was I trying to define my business? Or was I trying to define myself? Things got a little sideways at this point.
“I am me and my business is my business.”
We need to grow to thrive.
We need to evolve to feel like we’re going somewhere.
It’s all too easy to feel stagnant without those benchmarks of change and personal development.
In my life I’ve always trended towards the fresh & original approach, tackling big hairy ideas with gusto. But when I started my business at age 21 I had no idea the ride I would be in for.
At nearly 27 years of age, I feel like I’ve seen and done a lot through my business.
I haven’t yet made the vast sums of money I set out to acquire when I was 21.
But I’ve gotten more life experience than many of my peers.
The highs and the lows. The peaks and the valleys. The thrilling conversations… and the agonizing ones.
As I wrap this up, I’d like to say I’ve finally learned how to separate my identity as a human from my identity as a business owner.
It’s not quite true yet, but I’m much better at it today than I’ve ever been before.
All I know is that I am me. I am an incredible songwriter and music producer. I am a fun and exciting person who loves spending time with his SO, his pet, and his family.
My business is my business. It’s not who I am. It’s not my be-all, end-all. If it fails, then it fails. If it flies, then it flies. All I can do is give my best every day that I’m in the building and trust that doing great work and focusing on an impactful objective will make the difference that I want to see in the world.
If it fails I’ll still be here tomorrow, hunting for my next incredible opportunity. That’s just who I am. I dream big and I don’t give up, which can be a dangerous combination if you don’t have your mind right.
If you’re feeling squeezed between “I am me” vs. “my business is me”, then this one’s for you. You are yourself. And your business is your business. It’s as simple as that.
Good luck!
