The Entrepreneurs’ Workout

If I asked you what your title is, what would you say? Lawyer. Accountant. Physician. Partner. Associate? Few professionals would answer: Business Owner. Most of the clients and professionals whom I’ve asked this question tell me they had no interest in becoming an entrepreneur when they began their careers. They chose law because they loved the law or accounting because it was a respectable, safe profession. Rarely do I hear lawyers, accountants, or physicians say they yearned to build a business or looked forward to selling their services. Few have had much or any formal business training beyond the basics of practice start up. However, at the end of the day, aren’t all firms, at their core, entrepreneurial ventures? As a practitioner within your firm, you were accountable to see that your segment of the firm’s enterprise ran successfully, profitably, and efficiently. In essence, you were an entrepreneur before you started your own firm, or termed a different way, an Intrepreneur – a business “owner” under the umbrella of the bigger business. Solo practitioners experience this role quite directly because as a one-person venture, it’s obvious all of the business demands rest wholly on their shoulders.

The economic tsunami has altered the business playing field completely. Things have turned off-the-charts competitive and demanding. The new business landscape demands professionals gain a more business-savvy understanding of the marketplace, their prospects, clients, and their firms. But this will call not only for gaining new information but a complete mindset shift. Entrepreneurial professionals will have to wear new lenses, seeing the world through more entrepreneurial eyes.

In order to be successful, entrepreneurial professionals will now need to be building three kinds of muscle:

• Business generation muscle
• Business leadership and management muscle
• Business service muscle

As business generator, you will absolutely need to develop skills to connect with and engage new prospects, close new business, as well as deepen their relationships with current clients. It will become more and more important to gain social skills to engage, enroll, and inspire confidence and trust with the right people vs. depending on other rainmakers to feed them their workload.

As business leaders and managers, you will need to learn how to interview, train, delegate, and motivate talent so that the next generation of business generators and service deliverers can preserve the financial future of the firm. It is also necessary that these leadership skills are cultivated so that a competitive edge is maintained in the marketplace.

Functioning as business service provider may be most familiar to you. You know how to work hard and deliver the work to clients. Now they will need to manage this while taking on business generation and business leadership.

Here are six steps for successfully building business muscle: