Identifying the Gap: The Entrepreneur’s Dream

In the previous posts we addressed how to identify your entrepreneurial passion and your desired lifestyle. We also took a look at the things which you are not good at and don’t want to to.

The next step is for you as the entrepreneur to identify the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. To do that you need to identify your starting point.

Let’s take an inventory of where you are now. And then we will discuss how to close that gap altogether.

• What does your lifestyle look like today?

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• What is not working for you in your current lifestyle?

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• What do you love about your current lifestyle?

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• What does your business look like today?

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• What is not working for you in your business?

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• What do love about your business?

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What I found in doing this analysis is that I loved being a business owner and I loved marketing including all tasks and strategic thinking associated with it. I did not love the hours and schedule required in a retail store. I did not like shipping furniture, working with manufacturers of custom furniture, and some of the customer service issues that came along with the previous challenges. I love design and strategy. I love solving problems. I loved owning my choices.

What’s working for you? What’s not working for you?

The next step is “Closing the Gap”.

Visualize Your Lifestyle

As an entrepreneur, you have the ability to create any lifestyle you want. Are you living that life now? Most people just start doing and don’t think about where they want to go.

Do you know what your dream day looks like in perfect detail?

Have you spent time really thinking about it?

If you could choose to spend your time any way you wish, how would it be spent?

Here is an exercise that can put you in the space where you can allow your dream lifestyle to come to you.

Exercise: Lifestyle Visualization

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LISTEN to this VISUALIZATION exercise now.

Exercise: Define the Lifestyle of Your Dreams

Now think about your perfect day.

• Would you like everyday to be like that?

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• What would you like to have the same?

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• What would you like to be different?

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I want you to think about how you can incorporate elements of this dream day into your daily life.

• How does this impact your current lifestyle?

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• What changes do you need to make in your business to make your daily life accommodate your dream lifestyle?

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• Write down your dream lifestyle?

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In doing these exercises I realized that my perfect day was waking up and taking care of my kids, sending them off to school, then coming back home and working on something I was passionate about that helped others. I wanted something to stimulate my brain that would enable me to transform the lives of the people I cared about.

I also wanted to be free to pick my kids up from school and spend afternoons and evenings with them and my husband. I wanted relaxed weekends with the family. I wanted the time and money to travel for vacations. I wanted to live in a friendly environment with loving supportive neighbors who had children for my kids to play with. I want my kids getting the best education available and I want them to learn to pursue their dreams. I want not to think about money. I want to make a difference in the world and use my unique abilities as best I can. And this is what I want for others.

While this was my dream lifestyle, this is not where I was 18 months ago. I owned a retail store that was open 6 days a week from 10am to 6pm. And this was reduced hours. Before that we had been open 7 days a week, from 10am to 8pm.

Because of this schedule, I needed a live-in childcare to help care for my children (who were not school age). My husband and I tag-teamed the remaining childcare hours, were balancing that with work at the store. While one was home with the kids, the other was working.

Weekends away were not existent. Actually, we went a year without a weekend together as a family.

Exhaustion and stress ruled our lives. We were miserable.

I’d say that’s a pretty obvious difference between where we were and where we wanted to be. Needless to say, the store had to go.

Not all situations are as obvious as that. Though, as obvious as it was, it still took us nearly a year to close out that business and get back on track to fulfilling our life vision.

What is your vision? Please share it with me below. I’d love to hear what your dreams are.

As an entrepreneur, you can create any lifestyle you want for yourself and your family. It all starts with your dream. You can create, choose or tailor your business to accommodate your vision for your life. You start by figuring out what you are good at and then use those passions to fulfill your life purpose to help others.

After you identify your skills, you then need to identify what you want to avoid doing. You need to know what you are NOT good at and should NOT be spending your time on. These are things you either don’t want in your business or elements that you can outsource. When I worked at Microsoft we tended to outsource anything that was not a core business function. If the need for the service may be short-lived, it was outsourced.

How does this translate to your dream lifestyle? You want to build a business that utilizes your passions while minimizing your weaknesses and gives you the lifestyle of your dreams.

So, what is your ideal lifestyle?

Identify your desired lifestyle.

You need to take some time to define the lifestyle you want for yourself. As an entrepreneur you can choose how many hours you want to work or how many days of the week. You can choose what income level you want. You can choose who you want to work with. You can work alone or you can have employees. It’s all up to you.

I have some friends that take one weekend a year alone without the kids to get away, reconnect and set their goals as a couple for the following year. It is at this time that they reevaluate where they are and where they want to go. Then every month they take one afternoon to check in and evaluate where they are. And every week, they share their goals for that week.

How’s it working?

Well, they are on their 3^rd million in income and they aren’t even 40 yet. They have 2 very successful businesses and they work from home. They have 3 young children and they have the time they want to spend with them.

Unlike my friends, I don’t have the opportunity to leave my kids with family for the weekend while I escape for some goal setting time. However, I was able to book a weekend at my brother-in-law’s cabin in the mountains where my kids could run around in the fields while my husband and I reconnected on our vision and life’s purpose, both alone and together.

The point is to make the time to connect with your life vision and make corrections to your course to keep you on the right track.

17 Ways to Determine What You Should NOT be Doing as an Entrepreneur!

Exercise: Identify what you don’t want.

Part of living your passion and fulfilling your life’s purpose is to know what you do NOT like doing and are NOT good at. You want to identify your weaknesses, things you avoid and things you dislike so as to prevent you from draining your energy.

Let me give you an example. I discovered that I really did love the process of marketing. Now how do I turn that into a business that fulfills my life purpose? Well, I knew I didn’t want to ship products anymore, at least not durable goods. I didn’t want a lot of logistics. I didn’t want shipping damage, manufacturing delays and extensive customer service. I just wanted to focus on marketing and idea creation. Knowing what I didn’t want to do helped me to focus in on a business model that fit me best.

Now’s the time to make a list of everything you don’t like to do and are not good at. This next exercise is going to be the opposite of the last one you did. Again, don’t analyze, just dump out your thoughts and keep moving.

The answers to these questions will give you a clear idea of what areas of your business you will want to outsource or automate so as to minimize your involvement with them. Remember, our goal is to keep you focused on your passion. In order to do this you need to know what activities zap your energy.

• Think about the activities that you are NOT good at. Write them down.

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• What skills do you NOT have?

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• What are your weaknesses?

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• What tasks do you avoid?

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• What characteristics would your friends, family and colleagues use to describe your faults or weaknesses?

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• What do you hate to do? What makes you sad or frustrated? What causes you stress?

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• What do NOT like to do for play or leisure? What about that do you NOT enjoy?

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• What do you NOT like to read about?

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• What have you secretly hoped would never happen?

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• If you could avoid one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?

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• What would you never do, even if you got paid millions of dollars for it?

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• When you have spare time, what do you avoid?

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• What do you not like to talk about?

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• What do you hate doing for others?

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• At the end of your life, what would be the one thing you never want to have done?

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• Who do you NOT want to help, enable, or reach?

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• What five life experiences have given you the least sense of fulfillment or growth?

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Now that you know what you are good at and what you want to avoid, how can you use those passions to fulfill your life purpose as an entrepreneur? What is the business that utilizes your passions while minimizing your weaknesses? Are you able to outsource these items to someone else, like a virtual assistant?