Now before you read on, I’m not advocating burning the thing down, I’m referring to putting some spark back into it, and for that matter, putting some spark back into your life at the same time.

The best place to start it to re-evaluate yourself, the business owner. After all, it is your attitude, your beliefs, your habits and practices that determine the success or otherwise of your enterprise.

A good place to start is to look at yourself.

Which Style of Business Owner Are You?

There are predominantly four styles of business owner; which one are you most like?

1. The Entrepreneur

If you are a entrepreneur, you’ll be juggling many businesses or new concepts at the same time. A true entrepreneur will usually keep a business for two or three years before selling it. This is because the entrepreneur loves the excitement of the start up enterprise far more than day-to-day management. As soon as the business begins to settle down into routine and process, the entrepreneur gets bored and is off looking for the next project.

In many ways, the entrepreneur is his (her) own worst enemy. For all their bravado and grand ideas, their inability to balance business talent with management and perseverance coupled with  tunnel vision and a comparatively short attention span can lead many entrepreneurs to lose out in the bigger game of life.

Many risk falling in love with the challenges of business and not their most precious conquest, their primary partner and their family.

As strange as this may seem, the first step to setting this type of owners business on fire is to help them discover their life an purpose and truly comprehend how to live their lives.

2. The Manager

It will probably come as no surprise that managers manage. The manager is a person who is good at process, they generally like things to function efficiently and they tend not to stretch the business too far in terms of innovation or implementation of new ideas.

Manager owners are often very hard workers. In fact they can frequently be found working all hours of the night ensuring that everything is done correctly.

Often the way an owner manager can set their business on fire is to make a few strategically radical changes to the way they operate in both their personal and business lives.

This can be the hardest thing for this style of owner to do, but in the long term it has the potential to transform their business and their family and personal relationships.

3. The Technologist

The technologist is a person who has a good knowledge and an interest in something and so they start a business doing that thing. Many service businesses are owned by technologists, such as architects, graphic designers, landscape gardeners, solicitors, chefs, accountants etc.

Technologists tend to love their work and spend an inordinate amount of time doing it. However, their skills and their interest in other areas of the business are often lacking.

One of the unfortunate challenges faced by technologists stems from an attitude of, ‘If you want something done properly you have to do it yourself”. Technologists are often ‘time poor’.

To set fire to a technologist’s business will require sound creative thinking, and the best method  to achieve this will vary widely, depending on their chosen profession and their situation. Technologists need to develop a viable long term business model to give them piece of mind, and they need to focus on their own work-life balance.

4. The Retiree

We all love the retiree business owner, but it is so sad that the vast majority of them will end in disaster.

The retiree owner loves their business, that is why they do it. These are the people who have worked most of their lives in safe jobs but dreamed of owning their own business.

Retirees generally use their savings, a redundancy payout or their superannuation to start their dream business. It could be a coffee shop, a bike repair business, a fishing tackle and bait shop, a guest house or any of the thousands of other business options.

What usually brings them undone is a ‘build it and they will come’ attitude coupled with a lack of first hand experience in small business. Up until this point, they have lived a life in a protective cocoon as an employee and now they find themselves thrust into a business world that is nothing like the romantic vision that they always thought it to be.

Retirees need guidance and mentoring support from a business coach who understands the soft skills and who can help them transition from employee to business owner.

One is a senior manager in charge of a team of high performers with millions at stake and the other, the owner of a small business that is gradually running into the ground. Each started their enterprise from scratch and each have been in their respective roles for over a decade.

One of these runs a business now owned by a multinational, and constantly clashes with the board, citing different philosophical ways of doing business as the main cause of tension. And the other is just plain sick of running their small business and wants out.

So what do they have in common?

For the manager in the multinational corporation, the dilemma is whether to invest time and effort in battling the views of the other directors, or whether to take another management role elsewhere (and there have been offers).

For the owner of the small business, the decision is whether to invest more into the business and build it up (because it has plenty of potential) or to close up shop and take a well earned retirement.

Your Leadership Coach can help you make the hard decisions

It would appear that each of these people would be better off on a personal level if they walked away. Certainly they are both suffering from tremendous levels of executive stress that would completely disappear the moment they make the decision to leave – but what is causing the stress?

The answer is that they are creating their own stress.

Each of these managers has a very strong sense of loyalty to their staff and their clients, and they have both demonstrated admirable levels of integrity in their business dealings.

So whilst both want to get out of their respective roles, they each feel trapped by their own sense of responsibility and their own beliefs about what is the ‘right thing’ to do for others.

If either of these people walked away from their roles, it would cause a great loss to many people. The small business would fold and be no more, and the large one would suffer with the loss of a key man and take a very long time to recover. (Yes, some businesses really should have ‘key man insurance’.) Staff in both businesses will lose their jobs.

So what is the best solution?

These managers are both trapped by their own beliefs. If they walk away, they will get immediate release from the stress and responsibility, but because of their strong emotional connection to staff they have worked with and supported for so long, they will both find themselves living with a sense of failure. If not consciously, they will definitely feel it at a subconscious level.

They both know that people who depended on them for a living, people they have grown to know personally, people who have supported them, will lose their jobs.

If they walk away, they will know that they have let others down, because when push came to shove, they didn’t take the leadership position and continue the fight.

So, what would you do?