The one thing every entrepreneur needs, but few have

As an entrepreneur, you know that strategic planning is crucial for your business. However, many people overlook the impact of their personal goals, professional goals, values, and priorities on their business's growth and scalability. Based on my experience working with startups and entrepreneurs in various industries, a clearly articulated personal strategic plan is the number one thing missing from the entrepreneurial journey, even though personal factors implicitly and explicitly drive a founder's decision-making. Knowing what you want for your personal life will affect how you scale your business and define success.
Here are two reasons why:

Not all entrepreneurs want to create a large company

Contrary to popular belief, not all founders aspire to grow their business into a billion-dollar company. Many entrepreneurs want to build a business that allows them to lead a comfortable life. The definition of a comfortable life varies for each person, and these founders are clear that their personal goals are what they're optimizing for.

For instance, some entrepreneurs don't want to manage people, so the scale of their business is limited to what they can handle alone. Others are willing to manage people but desire work-life balance to have time for themselves, their children, and/or aging parents. As a result, the scale of their business will be limited based on the time they can dedicate to it each week and their delegation skills.

Not all entrepreneurs want to accept outside capital to grow their business
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For most businesses, a time comes when the founder must decide whether to take the company to the next level. This often involves deciding whether to fund growth organically or raise funds through debt or external investment. This decision will be influenced by the business owner's long-term goals and priorities and impacted by their values. For example:

• While taking on investors may seem like a good idea, it means relinquishing autonomy. Even a minority investor is likely to demand visibility into the strategic roadmap, sales pipeline, and revenues to ensure they get a return on their investment. While they want to ensure your success, some founders find their involvement intrusive and time-consuming. Not every founder wants to take that on.
• Debt comes with its own set of challenges. Lenders can be conservative, and the business must generate enough revenue to service the debt. Moreover, some people are uncomfortable with the notion of debt and prefer to grow organically as revenues permit.

Regardless, if a founder doesn't want to seek external funding, their business's growth will be restricted by their revenue and reinvestment capacity.
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By understanding one's personal goals, professional goals, values, and priorities, one can clearly articulate to themselves and others how and why they've made the decision not to scale. It also helps them recognize when they've achieved success based on their own definition of success. If you or someone you know would like help defining your personal strategic plan, please don't hesitate to reach out!

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