Working In and Working On a Business

We explored the technician, manager and entrepreneur in Roles of the Business Owner. The business owner will move between each three roles making sure their business is strong and steady, meeting its goals and heading in the right direction for the mission. The ability to look down on their business as a whole, oversee and plan ahead is essential! Without the ability to step back and look on some people ask if the business owner runs a successful business... If the business owner only works head down in the business, is the business owner not more accurately employed, without the benefit of having an employer to help oversee and support them? I’ll let you decide.

The business owner must manage their time between working in their business and working on their business. Moving between these two states enables the business owner to run a successful, stress-free and organised business.

What does it mean to work in and work on a business?

Working in a business involves tasks predominantly completed by the technician and the manager roles, as explained in Roles of the Business Owner. This may be sending emails, delivering the service to clients, doing whatever is required to ensure the clients are happy and satisfied, managing finance and making efforts to market and sell the service.

In contrast, working on a business involves tasks prominently done by the entrepreneur, as explained in Roles of the Business Owner. Working on the business requires the business owner to design the business’ mission, plan ahead for the future, set goals, measure progress and adapt the business operation when adaption is needed.

Working in and working on your business is a useful time management tool. Oftentimes, business owners will aim to spend a certain amount of time working in their business and a certain amount of time working on their business. How a business owner manages their time depends on the business owner’s goals and hopes for their business.

As we discussed in Two Approaches to a Business a business owner may aim to have a lifestyle business or an investment business, which means long-term plans differ and strategies to meet goals differ too.

Let’s consider how the owner of a lifestyle business may choose to manage their time. Note – the lifestyle business owner tends to operate and manage their business as a part of their daily life with little desire to build a team of people who will work in their business on their behalf. It’s common that the lifestyle business owner aims to have an even lifework split by building an established and steady business.

As the graph above shows, the lifestyle business owner may aim to work predominantly in their business as the years go by. They may be able to work less on their business because the business is well established and simply requires maintenance and small improvements. Naturally on day one, the lifestyle business owner must work diligently on their business, because the business needs planning, organising and the creation of a clear vision. In these early days, the entrepreneur is hard at work.

The investment business owner, however, will manage their time differently to the lifestyle business owner. The investment business owner will introduce other skilled and likeminded people to work with them. They may hire other professionals to take on their work in the business so that they have the time to oversee their business full-time. This may allow the investment business owner to earn an income passively as an investor.

In the graph below, we see that – like the lifestyle business owner – on day one the investment business owner is focused 100% of the time working on their business because this business also needs planning, organising and the creation of a clear vision.

Yet over time the investment business owner will hire a team and therefore will be able to work in the business less, allowing them more time to work on their business.

These graphs are designed entirely as a means to demonstrate how a business owner might spend their time and are not to suggest how business owners should manage their time. Each business owner has different plans and aims and will organise their time appropriately to meet these goals.

Written by Lily Llewellyn

April 14th 2025