How can the entrepreneur detach his role from the role of his business?
All too often, I come across entrepreneurs dealing with their businesses as if they are their own lives. This is a basic principle – in order to be able to resolve any issues within the business, the entrepreneur first has to realise that his role as entrepreneur is one thing and the role of the business is another. In the first instance, we’re talking about a person, and in the second, his creation.
A business, any way you look at it, is a creation, a “theatrical performance”, through which the entrepreneur’s idea comes to life. Through this, we achieve self-realisation in an ideal situation, we earn our living, we develop as individuals and we offer work to others.
Too frequently, the entrepreneur takes on the stressful situations of his clients and suppliers because he identifies so much with his business and views his business as his own life. Ideally, an entrepreneur should be able to disassociate himself from his business to the extent that he could reach the point of selling it, without feelings of personal loss.
The entrepreneur ought to see himself as a human resource within the framework of his business. He should know that he is entitled to a wage for the services he provides to his business every day, that he is himself a cost centre, and that he is expensive but also productive for his business. Through the analysis and diagnostic controls that we carry out at the αriston project, we can see that when taking into account the hours, the energy and the emotional cost that the entrepreneur invests, he is paid, on average, a lower hourly rate than his employees.
