Renters rights at the end of lease

Can’t have been too much or otherwise you would have accepted one of them .

If I may, I will give you a blunt tip:- the value of a business is not what someone will offer you when you are alive, it is what they will offer your estate when you are dead. In other words, if one gets hit by the proverbial bus on the way home this afternoon, what will one's partner and kids get for one's business. For most one person businesses, they will get nothing or something close to it.

Why? Because the business was a job.

I have a good friend. She thought she had a great business with clients in Australia, Hong Kong and China but it was a one-person ‘business’. When I gave her the above (blunt) tip, she realised that she had created herself a job, albeit a very good job that she totally loved.

Roll the clock forward a few years:- she now has staff in Australia and in China. Now she does have a business and, if she was hit by the proverbial bus, her family has an asset of value.

No, I’m not. But I get the feeling you are.

I will repeat what I said and highlight the bits I feel you missed:

The important question here is: “What is the role of a CEO?” To me, the person who performs this role:

1. Owns the vision/sets the strategic direction.
   
2. Provides the proper resources (capital, human, plant and equipment, etc).
   
3. Builds the culture (shared attitudes, goals, behaviors and values that characterise the business).
   
4. Oversees and delivers the business’ performance.

Every business needs someone to perform this role if it is to grow and be sustainable.

Again, I will repeat what I said and highlight the bits I feel you missed:

Then you give an example of a ‘business’ that has several employees .

Thank-you for this example as it is a great example for me to highlight what I am trying to say by applying the proverbial bus test.

In this “business”, if the hard working owner was run over by the proverbial bus on their way home tonight, then one of two things would happen:

1. The business would close or be sold off for basically its plant, equipment and stock. In this case, the “business” owner only really had a job.
   
2. The business stays open (maybe run by one of the family members or one of the staff has enough knowledge/skills/experience to be appointed as a manager) or it is sold off as a going concern (that is for a lot more than the value of its plant, equipment and stock). In this case, the “business” owner had more than a job; they had a business.

I feel it is important for ‘business’ owners to know whether they have created a job for themselves (to me, all single person ‘businesses’) or whether they have created a business and they are one of the people who work in the business. Both are good income generating models but one creates a valuable asset over time. It is important for people to know which one they have created.

Depending on how things go, one can lead to the other. I have seen ‘businesses’ that were really jobs grow into true businesses (I have done this) and I have seen real businesses shrink into one person ‘businesses’ (or what I would term a job) through tough times, bad management, …

Once again, you are stuck on someone having the title of CEO. As I have outlined up above, I am talking about the role of CEO.

In a lot of small businesses, the role of owner/founder, the role of Managing Director and the role of CEO are all performed by the same person. In a lot of cases, they don’t know where one role starts/ends and don’t know how to delegate the roles to someone else. Not all business owners make good CEOs/MDs for their businesses. In a lot of cases, this person holds the business back from growing which I find very sad. One indicator of this is that this person spends too much time working in the business and not on the business (to steal Michael Gerber's line).

My apologies for such a long post (but it is something that I am passionate about) and for taking this thread off topic.

 

OK, Gentlemen, you know that you are both correct, in that you both own and manage a "business". Back to Kyosaki's Quadrant.

 

But you are incorrect. I am retired and do NOT own a business .