At Vesta, we work with numerous small and mid-sized business owners. As business coaches, our consulting experts try to express the importance of a desirable goal: build a business that serves your life rather than spending your life serving your business.
Many of our clients find this goal insightful but impractical. Many business owners refer to themselves as “workaholics” who have difficulty separating their home life from their business life, often leaving a blurred line between them. Vesta’s consultants have witnessed business owners sacrifice personal time, family time, personal goals, and even their individual wealth to meet the demands of their businesses. It is a dangerous loop that can create negative patterns, cause schisms in personal and professional relationships, and hurt the spirit and motivation of the owners, their families, and their employees.
While Vesta wholeheartedly endorses a healthy work-life balance, we are an organization of facts, so we recognize that owning and operating a successful business doesn’t happen overnight. Great sacrifices are required to reach goals before financial comfort can settle in. However, we believe that if business owners are not striving for that ideal balance as a goal, they can quickly lose sight of the motivators that inspired them to start their business in the first place.
Neglecting to form a Strategic Plan for the future can delay escape from the vicious cycle where business goals are never met, revenues fail to serve their purposes, and the daily routine becomes less of a passion and more of a daunting task.
While operating a business alongside managing a healthy personal life is a crucial component to personal wealth and success, business owners often lose sight of the whole picture because they are too focused on the present. Aside from their daily contributions, businesses are also meant to support their owners’ lives during their retirement years, often through sale or acquisition. While business owners might have the future sale value of their business in the back of their minds, those thoughts are usually put on the back burner to focus on more immediate needs.
However, what if most owners were to ask themselves, “If I were to retire and sell my business today, would the liquidated value be enough to support me for the rest of my life?”
Unfortunately, statistics point to the answer to that question being a firm “no.” Aside from the economics associated with longer lifespans and the reality of business valuation, many small business owners haven’t implemented any Strategic Plans to help build their company’s value and provide the highest return on investment when retirement comes.
There’s no need to panic, though! If retirement is still a way off, there is plenty of time to form a Strategic Plan that can help enhance your financial position when you are ready to sell your business or hand off its reigns. Vesta’s expert consultants can help implement a structured, cohesive Strategic Plan to plant the seeds of success for your business. By the time retirement rolls around, you should be walking in a field of blooming prosperity, ready to settle down comfortably after a lifetime of dedicated hard work.
To get started on your future financial comfort, reach out to the expert financial and strategic consultants at Vesta. We’ll work with you to explore all the best pathways to ensure your business serves your lifestyle, not the other way around!
