Business Leadership

Cyrina explores business leadership in the context of entrepreneurship. This episode breaks down the leap from entrepreneur to business leader—trade-offs, team-building, and how not to lose your craft. Are you scaling or creating? Listen now and tell us which path fits you best.

Transcript

Why These Words Matter

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This podcast was designed to share words and phrases that entrepreneurs should be aware of and know in their day-to-day operation. I hope this helps you continue to build something beautiful and it's immediately helpful in your day-to-day operations. Let's get started. Moving from entrepreneurship into business leadership requires a new risk tolerance and new expectations for how you grow your business. When you're an entrepreneur, you're focused on identifying a solution for an unmet need. And when you're growing a business, you're thinking about how can I standardize this operation and grow it. As a strategist who works directly with entrepreneurship, I see people struggle with this difference. And it's this difference that can make or break your experience as an entrepreneur, not just your success, but your enjoyment. Because part of why you do this is you want to build a job for yourself that you actually like, you want to solve this problem. And when you're unclear about what growth looks like, it adds more stress to your day-to-day. So, for example, you have a food operation, food truck business, and you want to make more revenue. And you know that in order to make more revenue, you need to clone yourself. You need to scale up and have a different throughput and produce more goods. Well, you have to reflect on how important is it for you to be able to continue to explore your exploration in on the culinary side. Do you still want to be able to experiment? Do you still want to grow and add new flavors on what you're making? Because if the answer is yes, you want to caution yourself from expanding and growing how much food you're making or how many of the items that you're making that are success, because it will limit your capacity to continue to create and make new creations. Those two things sound like they're just choices on how to manage your time, but they're actually deciding on whether you want to be a business leader or an entrepreneur. You can be an entrepreneur, but your revenue is capped. And it doesn't mean entrepreneurs can't make endless money. I'm not saying that an entrepreneur is a lifestyle, it's a mindset. But as you grow the current operation that you are running, those are the decisions that you have to make. And you also want to decide like, do you want to continue to grow teams and develop talent? And in order for you to make it to whatever level of growth that you want to get to, you have to make a decision on what growth looks like for you. And what growth looks like for you typically is rooted in do you want to be an entrepreneur or do you want to be a business leader? So we're going to define business leadership because this podcast is called Words and it's not like a typical Merriam-Webster definition, but we will pull up something at vocabulary.com. Close enough. They call it a very wealthy or powerful businessman. So I'm gonna go and define business leadership because I forgot an operative portion of this word. Business leadership refers to how individuals make decisions, set goals, and provide directions in a professional environment. And this is directly from indeed.com. And I actually like this definition because it talks about how you make decisions, set goals, and provide direction. You don't think about those things when you're an entrepreneur, you're just like, I'm here to make money, I'm here to make things that make money, and I'm here to focus on making sure that I solve this problem for my target customer. You have to think deeper about the decisions you make, set the goals, and lead a team. You have to communicate more. You have to provide more direction to your team. And that takes work that doesn't involve solving the problem. So you have to reflect on what portions of problem solving you're really excited about. Now, the goal of this is not to say you can only be a success if you are a business leader, but I am trying to articulate what growing your business can look like in a repeatable fashion and that you need a business leader on board. So it doesn't mean that all entrepreneurs transition to a business leader, but they have to be astute enough to understand if they need to bring a business leader on board to their organization. Because typically it's not the entrepreneur that's able to become that business leader, but they bring on somebody, whether it's a family member or an outside person, to serve in that role. So I love this term. And I think if you're an entrepreneur listening to this, reflect on the term business leadership, what it means to you, what type of role you want to play long term in your business, because it will help inform how you structure your next set of activities and move forward in making money. Thank you for listening to the podcast, Business Strategy. If you'd like to work with us directly, you can book a whiteboard strategy workshop in the link in the description. Have a great day.