How to Build the Business You Actually Want

by Kyla Denanyoh

Growth Isn’t the Only Goal

Entrepreneurs hear a lot about building bigger businesses with more clients, revenue, employees, and visibility. But growth isn’t automatically the same thing as building a business you actually want.

If your business became twice as successful tomorrow, would you actually enjoy running it?

Another popular theme in the Women Thriving in Business podcast is that every business owner has their own goals and ways to determine how to build a business they actually want. Goals, like success, are fluid, and definitions vary widely.

However, keep in mind that thriving in business means intentionally creating an organization that supports your goals, your life, and eventually your legacy.

Building that business requires asking questions beyond, How do I make more money?

It means asking:

What am I actually building?
What role do I want to have in this company?
What needs to change for this business to grow?
Could this company eventually operate without me?
What do I ultimately want this business to give me?

To begin, let’s determine how to understand what season you’re currently in with your business.

What’s in Season for Your Business?

In this episode, Women Thriving in Business host Nikki Rogers explains how learning to make and store strawberry jam became a wonderful analogy for life as a business owner.

Before deciding what your business needs next, determine what’s in season for you right now. If you do not know what season you are in with your business, you are in the right place. Let’s look at a few questions.

Some entrepreneurs are planting:

Testing ideas
Building visibility
Developing expertise
Finding their first customers

Others are growing:

Creating systems
Hiring
Increasing revenue
Improving operations

Others may be preparing to harvest:

Stepping away from daily operations
Selling
Creating a succession plan
Turning the business into a long-term asset

A few women thriving in business are experiencing multiple aspects at the same time, while others are resting, having recently left one season and awaiting the next. As business owners, you do not have to chase anyone else’s definition of growth, including my examples for each season. Depending on your industry and whether you are a service provider, coach, or marketing consultant, the tasks in my examples might not fit at all. This is the beauty of entrepreneurship, and I hope you take away the main point: you determine what season you are in. Listen to Build, Grow and Thrive in Business feat. Nikki Rogers to hear the full story.

A few additional questions to help you determine your season include: what resources are required to reach your next goal, and what tools and systems are in season for your business right now.

Are you still using spreadsheets to track customers when it is time for a CRM tool? Are you sending cold pitch emails to prospective clients when you could upsell your current clients? Determining where you are and what you need will help you identify what you need to get where you are going.

Discover the Business Behind the Business

Now that we know our entrepreneurial season, let’s get specific about what the business needs. When Alicia Butler Pierre joined the podcast, we discussed how to create a hidden blueprint for your business and the value of operations.

Picture this: every business has multiple departments. Even a one-person company contains multiple departments, such as:

Marketing
Sales
Client services
Finance
Operations
Administration
Business development

As a woman thriving in business, you are doing it all because you are free, or extremely discounted, labor. You complete every task in your business, which means you are constantly wearing multiple hats and making every department feel like one giant job.

I would encourage you to finish reading this blog, then find 15 minutes this week to write down every task that you complete. Everything from buying new pens to rescheduling meetings to updating contracts to designing a logo. After you write everything down honestly, your mind will alert you to additional tasks you complete that you forgot about. Spend the next week continuing to list your activities so you can celebrate yourself for working so hard.

Finally, let’s group these activities by their category. You may use the categories that I provided above or create your own. The point is to see where your time is going.

Then start documenting what happens within each one. Make a simple outline of tasks, and add to them. Let’s use podcasting as an example:

What happens as soon as someone agrees to work with you or signs a contract?
What happens next shouldn’t exist only in the entrepreneur’s head.
Create repeatable processes.
Create a folder for each department.
Develop a basic records-management system.
Think about workspace logistics.
Establish routines that promote productivity rather than stifle it.

This activity is helping you identify the hidden blueprint of your business, which Alicia Butler Pierre explained so well in the Hidden Blueprint episode of Women Thriving in Business. You have so much institutional knowledge that you have overlooked, and we need to get the processes on paper so that you can begin to delegate more. You don’t create systems because you’re already a large company. You create systems so your company can become one.

These seemingly small organizational decisions become the infrastructure that allows a company to grow.

Stop Pretending You Have to Know Everything

People like to glamorize what we don’t know. Before starting a business, you believe that being an entrepreneur will be fun. Before becoming a parent or guardian, you believe that you will handle the long nights and diaper changes better than everyone else you’ve seen. Entrepreneurs are the same: we often glamorize things we haven’t experienced.

Hiring team members sounds wonderful. Scaling a business sounds exciting. Selling a business sounds lucrative. But we don’t know what we don’t know. One way to close that knowledge gap is through informational interviews.

Talk to entrepreneurs who have already built what you’re considering.

Ask:

What surprised you?
What became harder as the company grew?
What do you wish you had known?
What changed about your role?
Would you build it the same way again?

Tasha Smith discussed the value of an informational interview and why she always has a backup plan to her backup plan. Listen to Building a Legacy: Scaling a Business for a Greater Purpose.

Very few people think about the publishing industry or authors as being business owners, but they are. Tracking book sales, marketing, public relations, and navigating publisher and agent relationships are new paths. Women thriving in business must keep learning and growing, especially before making major decisions.

In the episode called the Three P’s of Business, Fenyx Blue explains how planning, partnership, and purpose allow business owners to remain continuous learners. With decades of publishing and multiple authors who have worked with her, Fenyx continues to attend conferences to learn and study more about publishing and trends in book marketing.

Expertise isn’t something entrepreneurs achieve and then stop developing.

There will always be something new to learn, test, or understand, and when you begin believing you know everything, you stop growing as an entrepreneur.

Whether you want to read books, attend conferences, request informational interviews, or spend time networking and learning from your professional and personal inner circles, entrepreneurs must keep learning. Showing your commitment to your industry helps you see where you could go with your business and whether you actually want the future you’re imagining.

The Women Thriving in Business podcast has multiple guests who emphasize the benefits of gathering information by intentionally surrounding yourself with people who can help you grow.

Tasha Smith describes the different circles entrepreneurs need:

Consultants
Professional networks
Industry peers
Mentors
Personal inner circles

Not everyone serves the same purpose. Some people help you make strategic decisions. Some provide expertise. A few people will make introductions for you. Some simply know you well enough to recognize when you’re making decisions out of fear instead of strategy.

Surrounding yourself with different leaders and women at different stages of their businesses will let you learn from them, and you will begin to push each other. You can share challenges and encourage each other because, as a business owner, everything will not always go as planned.

When Plan A doesn’t work, you have to look towards Plan B, C, D, and X. Resilient business owners have options, and a thriving entrepreneur has people they can call.

You Wrote the Blueprint. Now Let Someone Help You Build It.

You have documented how your business operates and the tasks that generate revenue, which leaves a lot of other activities. These additional tasks aren’t revenue-generating and should be considered for outsourcing.

Let me say that again: Delegate and outsource tasks, activities, and meetings that do not generate revenue.

We want to acknowledge this directly because most guests on Women Thriving in Business discuss delegation. Whether they explain the value of prioritizing, hiring well, delegation, or better team alignment, their advice can be boiled down to what activities bring money into the business and what activities you can stop doing yourself.

Thrivers, please understand that if your business isn’t generating enough revenue to hire or outsource tasks, this isn’t a judgment on you. This is where you can learn from other business owners because every business, no matter how niche or grand, will require multiple tasks completed, and we know you can find something to delegate when you are ready.

Refer back to earlier in this blog when we discussed what season your business is in, how to identify it, and how to find supporting resources. This doesn’t mean you hand off every administrative task immediately. Instead, ask:

Where is my time most valuable?

If the entrepreneur is spending hours maintaining spreadsheets, scheduling appointments, organizing files, or manually completing work that technology or another person could manage, that can limit the company’s growth.

Use the spreadsheet-to-CRM example provided by Nicole Grinnell of Bosun Solutions:

At one stage, spreadsheets may work perfectly.
Eventually, multiple spreadsheets can prevent the business from reaching the next level.
Growth can require abandoning tools, systems, and habits that once worked.

Building the business you want may require accepting that you cannot remain responsible for every part of it. Learn more from these episodes: Build a Team to Change and Scale Your Business, The Hidden Blueprint, and Business Creates Freedom.

Always Innovate and Market

Finally, in order to build a business you actually want, we need to determine how to take AIM to exit rich. AIM is Always Innovate and Market. Why should we do this, Thrivers?

Think about leaving when you start your business.

At first, that idea may sound backward, but your exit strategy affects how you build.

Because there is no guarantee that an activity or task that worked in your business for the last three years will work for the next three. Businesses change. Customers change. Technology changes. Industries change.

From the Exit Rich episode, begin to ask the three questions from the episode:

What business am I in?
What do I do better than anyone else?
What business should I be in?

These questions keep entrepreneurs from becoming overly attached to their company’s current version.

You want to create a business that someone else wants to buy, meaning your accounting and finances are in order, you haven’t overinflated your team with staff members, and you are paying yourself a salary someone would have to pay out if they acquired the business. Thrivers, a business designed to thrive, must remain relevant.

Continue with the self-exploration. Ask yourself:

Could someone understand how this company operates without me?
Are important processes documented?
Does the company have value beyond my personal labor?
Have I developed people who can lead?
Have I built a recognizable niche?
Would someone else actually want to own this?

A company that depends entirely on its founder is very different from an asset someone else could eventually operate, inherit, or buy.

An exit doesn’t have to mean selling tomorrow—or ever. However, you must build the best asset that someone would want to buy, even if you ultimately decide to keep it.

What Do You Actually Want This Business to Become?

Building the business you actually want is about more than growth. It’s about more than reaching the next revenue milestone. It’s about intentionally deciding what you’re creating.

You can plant.
You can grow.
You can harvest.
You can build systems.
You can create a team.
You can innovate.
You can scale.

And eventually, you can build something that continues creating value beyond your direct involvement. But none of those decisions should happen automatically. Because the goal isn’t simply to build a bigger business.

Keep thriving!