The 3 Types of Founder Roles

There are three roles to every business:

1) Working In the Business 
2) Working On the Business 
3) Working Outside of the Business

Number 1 “Working In the Business” includes activities on a day-to-day level that help complete daily processes, accounting, salesmanship, shipping, inventory, customer service, etc.

Number 2 “Working On the Business” includes higher level strategic planning, forecasting, asset management (human capital, financial capital, budgeting, modeling, marketing, etc), governance of people, branding, etc.

Number 3 “Working Outside of the Business” includes raising capital from investors, banks, angels, VC, crowdfunding, etc, Board governance, dealing with strategic partners, public relations brand building, non profit tie-ins, scouting for potential new hires, partners, suppliers, prospecting customers, trend forecasting, etc.

At any given moment, we can easily get hit with three completely different requests that fall into three different buckets. Then what do you do? Try to tackle all three? Good luck.

We must be vigilant to not allow ourselves to get distracted, and instead, focus on the area that moves the needle the most for your business.

I suggest structuring your day/week to tackle all three (3) but at different times, and with absolute singularity of focus and attention on just that one task. No distractions, no “let me just handle this one thing and get back to this other more important thing”, no “I’ll get to that later” and the it never gets done.

SINGULARITY OF FOCUS WINS.