I'm sat in Christopher Watkin's studio in Grantham, recording for the Letting Agent Podcast, and Chris asks me a question I like straight away.
"How can you make business owners happier in their life, more fulfilled, and enjoy life being a business owner?"
"I love that question, Chris," I say, "because that actually comes back to how I define success."
I told him my answer to that had changed massively over the years. "For me now, success is summed up in one word: serenity. Success is peace of mind." I've written more on that in What is success?, so I'll leave it there.
Build the life first
What I told him next was how I worked with business owners at the time. Coaching or training, it started in the same place.
"What is it that matters to you as an individual? How do we build the life that gives you that? So how do we build the business that gives you that life?"
The order is the point. Life first. Then the business that gives you that life.
It also meant we never only worked on the business. Results came, but as I put it to Chris, "most of that comes by you working on you, by you looking at you." If someone wasn't comfortable looking at themselves, I said they were probably the wrong person to work with me.
At the time I'd moved to working with smaller groups so we could go deeper. A couple of months before we recorded, I'd run a two-day retreat where every single person cried at some point. That was never the plan. I told Chris I'd hardly market it that way, because nobody would come.
The face of it, or the income from it
This is where people differ. Some owners love being in the business. They want to be the face of it, right in the middle, and that's what fires them up. Others just want the income, with as little time in it as they can manage so they can spend their time on other stuff.
"Neither of those is right or wrong, by the way."
It's a different perspective, that's all. What matters is what you're trying to achieve with your life, and then building around that. If you want to be front and centre, great. If you'd rather it ran without you most days, that's fine too.
I didn't plan my own path either. I told Chris I fell into business coaching after about 17 years in IT, the last stretch running offices in four countries and flying round the world until I didn't want to do it anymore.
The ripple you can't buy
Over three years of delivering business and marketing training, I'd noticed it was making a difference to people personally, without me meaning it to. Plenty of them came back and said I'd helped change their life. I don't take that on. "I don't think I'm ever responsible for it." I might help someone spot something to work on. They're the ones who put it into place.
What I love is seeing the shift. I'd watched people become a completely different person in 18 months to two years. They light other people up. As I said to Chris, "everything has changed for them, and you can't buy that."
And it doesn't stop with them. Every person who has a big shift in outlook passes it on to someone else, and they pass it on again. Yes, we all have bills to pay. "But there's an aspect of what I do that you can't buy, and I can't even fully articulate, but it's the difference in other people and the ripple effect of that that makes me do what I do."
"I don't need to be named in it." I meant that.
Watch the full chat
Help someone today, quietly
The last thing I told Chris was how I tried to start each day. "Okay, what can I do today to help someone, even if I don't get found out?" Quite often I'd make sure I wasn't found out.
Chris chipped in with "Or get paid."
"Exactly, yeah," I said. "It's not about the money."
First published August 2019 on Christopher Watkin's Letting Agent Podcast.
