Survive or Thrive? Look at the Business, Then Look at the Owner.

“The money coming in and goes out just as quickly.”

After 25 years of conversations with small business owners, I only need to say those words. Heads nod every time.

Survival is never far from the conversation. It shows up most often around cashflow, and it rarely stays in the bank account.

When the business is surviving

A business is surviving when it’s open, operating and covering its costs, but cash is always tight.

Most owners respond sensibly. They do a cashflow forecast to see whether they’ll make it through the next few months. Then their accountant suggests working out a breakeven point. Why? To make sure the business survives.

These are two really important tools, and I’d never tell an owner to stop using them.

But notice what they measure. Cashflow tells you whether you’ll have enough to get by. Breakeven tells you how much you need to sell to reach enough.

Enough is the survival line.

When the owner is surviving

Here’s what I’ve noticed over those 25 years. When the business is surviving, the owner usually is too.

Tight cash doesn’t stay on the spreadsheet. It follows you home. It’s in the 2am wake-ups, the weekends spent catching up, and the holiday that keeps getting pushed back until things settle down.

The business is running on empty, and so is the owner. Each one feeds the other.

I know this from the inside.

Years ago I was group CEO of a billion-dollar group. The business was struggling, and I was travelling around the world trying to fix it. The scale was very different from the businesses I work with now, but survival mode felt the same: problems in every direction, and me running on empty to hold it all together.

Then my boss paid me a surprise visit. That was enough. It tipped me over the edge, and I collapsed. I was taken to hospital from the worksite.

Looking back, I had let my circumstances decide the state of my inner world. I became a hostage to them. Life felt like it was being done to me, rather than me doing life.

Enough isn’t enough

The subtitle of my book, 3 Months Forward , is: Stop running on empty. Start building margin.

That’s the difference between surviving and thriving, in a business and in a person.

Surviving is having enough. Thriving is having more than enough.

In a business, more than enough is margin. It’s a price that leaves something over after each customer. It’s profit that builds rather than evaporates. It’s cash in the bank that the business created, not cash borrowed to keep it afloat. That’s why I built the 3 Margin Framework: to help owners build more than enough in their customers, their profit and their cash flow.

In a person, more than enough is rest.

Rest is a foundation, not a reward

Most owners I meet treat rest as a reward. You rest after the big job is finished, after the end of the financial year, after things settle down.

But in a surviving business, things never settle down, so the reward never comes.

What if rest were a foundation instead? It would be something you build in at the start, the way margin is built into a price, rather than something you hope is left over at the end.

I’ve been on a 15-plus-year journey of discovering inner rest. Most of it has come down to slowing three things: the way I walk, the way I talk and the way I eat.

The eating one surprised me. When I slow down, food is much easier to swallow. Nothing gets stuck in my throat.

The hospital was a slowdown forced on me. These were slowdowns I chose.

It sounds simple, but it wasn’t easy. And it taught me something I now see in every business I work with.

Thriving works from the inside out

A fruitful life is lived from the inside out, and so is a fruitful business.

When an owner is running on empty, they make survival decisions. They chase any revenue, discount to win the job and say yes to customers who drain them. Those decisions keep the business in survival, which keeps the owner on empty.

When an owner has some rest underneath them, they make different decisions. They price for margin. They plan three months forward instead of reacting to this week. They can say no.

Margin in the business makes room for rest in the owner. Rest in the owner makes room for better decisions in the business.

That’s the move from surviving to thriving. It doesn’t start with working harder. It starts with building in more than enough.

So where are you?

Look at your business. Is it running on enough, or more than enough?

Now look at yourself. Is rest your reward for getting through, or the foundation you work from?

Which one is harder for you to build? Let me know in the comments.