A key message, that I do my best to bestow when I’m engaging with entrepreneurs, is that massive business success is entirely achievable without hard work.

In fact, I’d like to venture further: hard work (by which I mean excessive quantities of work over lengthy periods of time) will usually lead to business failure.

Because if you don’t achieve freedom from hard work, the best outcome is that your business will continue to grow slowly, while you work harder and harder. A less satisfactory outcome is that you will go into burnout (this happened to me, and its not recommended), which may lead to the end of your business aspirations.

Neither of these options is attractive. And neither is necessary.

What I am suggesting, as an alternative, is that you work less. Very much less. And at the same time that you are working very much less, your business will grow rapidly and become much more profitable.

So try this concept on for size: less work equals more profitability.

“Are you crazy”, I hear you ask!? Well, I’m going to tell you that it’s not only possible, it’s entirely achievable. However, before we can get there, we need to take a look at an important problem.

The problem is this: since you are currently doing hard work, we can be certain that your current way of operating is not appropriately aligned for future success. In fact, your current way of working is fundamentally flawed. It is the same flaw that exists in most small businesses.

That flaw is hard work (and lack of freedom).

So, you need to make some alterations to the foundations of your business and to the way that you work. The main objective of these alterations is to create freedom time for you, so that you can become the freedom entrepreneur, as opposed to your current guise as the hard working entrepreneur.

In order to make these foundational changes, you must go back to the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey. You must re-create your business from the ground up, so as to reduce your personal role within it. You must reinvent your business so that it is able to function without you.

Yes, you did read that correctly: your business must be able to function without you! What I mean by this is that your constant attention must not be a pre-requisite to the day-to-day operation of the business.

Before you accuse me of losing track of reality, please note that I’m not saying that you must not be involved in your business. I’m saying that the proper functioning of your business must not depend on you. Because your business will not grow effectively unless you are free from doing everything that needs to be done within the business.

So, your goal must now be to create freedom from hard work. But what does freedom from hard work actually mean, and what would it look like for you? These are questions that business creators rarely consider – they are so busy working that they cannot even imagine how it could be any different.

To put it very simply, freedom from hard work means that you no longer do any hard work. This doesn’t mean that you no longer work. What it means is that the work that you do will be very different in type and quantity from the work that you did when you were working hard.

Right now you are most likely doing all or most of the day-to-day tasks that comprise the nuts and bolts of the business operations. The objective is for you to stop this completely (you will achieve this result incrementally, over a relatively short period of time).

The end result of these changes will be that you will become the freedom entrepreneur.

To put it another way, your time in the very near future will be spent working on your business, rather than in your business. This is the single most important concept. Working on your business is the role of the freedom entrepreneur. Working in your business is an activity that you will no longer engage in.

Working in the business is performing tasks that comprise the role of a producer.

The work of a producer (production work) is typically the work that is carried out by an employee or independent contractor. Production work is all the stuff that is directly involved with producing the product or service that your business sells.

In a hair salon, production work is cutting hair, ordering and sorting supplies, cleaning equipment and floors, and taking payments from customers for the service.

In the hotel trade, production work is taking reservations, welcoming guests, ordering supplies, cooking and serving food, cleaning rooms, and maintaining the building.

In a law firm, production work includes marketing the firm’s services, providing legal advice, and producing and sending invoices.

There is nothing wrong with production work. It’s absolutely vital that production work gets done. But production work is not the work of the freedom entrepreneur.

In order to achieve the freedom time that is necessary for fast and effective business growth, you must drastically reduce your role as producer. The amount of freedom that you enjoy in the future will be directly proportionate to how successful you are right now in setting up the business to function, mostly, without you.

Freedom Entrepreneur provides a step-by-step guide for hard working entrepreneurs to work less, avoid burnout and to maximize profit