The Entrepreneur’s Balance Sheet
Use balance sheet principles to map your business journey.
The story of your business is told on the balance sheet. Reporting the assets, liabilities, and equity held at a given point in time (or at different time intervals) can help you better understand the means available to you for creating future profits, life satisfaction and happiness.
Most entrepreneurs move quickly, often without thinking of the cost and consequences of their decisions and actions to themselves and others. The balance sheet is where you see the effect of your past decisions. It’s a snapshot for monitoring the health of your business and its impact on your life.
You can use common balance sheet principles to document your entrepreneurial journey. This exercise is particularly helpful when feeling disconnected from yourself or from your business — a situation that occurs when you are:
- overly focused on presenting yourself as a brand,
- trying to create a public persona, and
- polishing an image of yourself that’s more surface than substance.
Such behaviour is toxic. It gets in the way of the real job of an entrepreneur, which is figuring out who you are, what you stand for, and what value you offer to your market.
Defining the business is your most important entrepreneurial work. Be very specific about how it serves your wants and needs as its owner. The point is to be the master of your business, not a perpetual slave to it.
Think about all aspects of your business in terms of assets and liabilities. This will guide future decision making more effectively. Here’s how:
Take a fresh sheet of paper (or open your favourite journal to a blank page) and draw a line down the center. On the left side, record your assets; on the right, your liabilities for each of the following categories:
1 SELF
Skills/knowledge you have are assets; skills/knowledge you need but lack are liabilities.
2 MARKET
Opportunities are assets; obstacles are liabilities.
Attributes that serve your vision and authentic self are assets; attributes that don’t are liabilities.
3 RELATIONSHIPS
Some alliances, advisors. team and family members are assets; many are liabilities.
4 TIME
Productive activities are assets; non-productive habits and distractions are liabilities.
Being solely focused on striving to please the market and presenting the brand you think will sell only leads to a growing sense of disconnection from the self. Thus, in most cases, your public persona is not who you really are.
Pretending to be someone you’re not and selling what you don’t believe in or in a way that isn’t congruent with your true self is a road to ruin.
The entrepreneur obsessed with achieving success pursues it with the passion of a spiritual quest, believing it is a lifestyle choice. Unable to recognize when success has arrived, it remains forever elusive often resulting in financial and emotional bankruptcy. Don’t let that be the story told on your balance sheet.
