Whether our business controls us or we control it, depends on one thing.

How efficient (or inefficient) are we?

Note I did not say absence of problems

Or years of experience.

or the level of the skill set.

Because anyone who is efficient can over shortcomings like lack of experience or expertise.

Imagine you are a business that is struggling to onboard new clients and you know a lot of your problems will be solved if you just get some new clients.

What do you do?

You start spending 2-3 hours a day or 2 full days in a week to work on finding new clients. If you do that for 8 weeks in a row, where will you be? Ahead of where you are now, I guess?

But it will only happen if you are efficient. Which most business owners are not.

Even when they know what they need to do to grow, they don’t do it. Not because they don’t want to. They can’t do it because they can’t get off the ‘hustle to serve existing customers’ treadmill.

For someone who is efficient, or on the path, finds time to solve whatever problems are holding them back.

You won’t see much difference between an efficient and inefficient founder in a year. Maybe one will seem happier and more in control than another.

But in 5 years, the difference in scale and pace of growth can be very visible. The inefficient one may not be even running that business, because they may get frustrated and leave to do something else, only to get frustrated there and leave that new thing as well.

Which camp are you in? Efficient or the other one?