If you’re not taking a riskin business – perhaps you’re not doing it properly?

This morning I want to talk about taking risks and why it’s important to the success of your business.

The very fact that you’re reading this already means, that you’ve already taken one of the biggest risks in your life.

You started a business. You said no to the 9-5. No to a regular dependable salary coming in every month. No to holiday pay, pensions and someone else sorting out your tax for you.

But on the same hand, you said yes to freedom. Yes to personal growth. Yes to testing out your ideas. Yes to making a difference. And yes to potential untapped riches.

However even though you made this big leap, you said yes, I work with entrepreneurs all the time that can then get a little stuck.

A little scared of taking the next risks necessary to grow their business.

Perhaps this resonates with you. Are you scared that by putting yourself out there again that you might fail?

I see people do this all the time. They launch a new fantastic product, but they don’t really launch it, they only tell a handful of people. They are frightened that if they put their heart and soul behind it and it fails that they will be a failure. That people will know that they failed.

So it’s easier not to really get your back behind, because if in a perverse way it fails, they can’t really be blamed for the failure, because they never really tried.

Funny how our brains work!

And conversely, people can be equally scared of success. Maybe this resonates with you. What if their business is uber-successful and they become rich beyond their wildest dreams? And that this will change them intrinsically as a person, and they may lose friendships.

Or if they become successful, they will have to work all the hours God sends and have less time for their loved ones.

Or even if they become too successful, they will go into the next tax bracket, and so they play small and safe.

I see both sides of this coin all the time with my clients.

And the thing is you get to create your business the way you want. You get to decide how many hours you work, you get to decide how much you charge for stuff, you get to decide how much energy you put behind your products.

If this has resonated with you, ask yourself the following questions:

What do you believe?
What would you rather believe?
What emotions are you holding onto to get a secondary gain (by not really taking the risk I don’t have to get out of my comfort zone and I’m not responsible for following failures)?
Is the payoff worth the limitations you are setting on yourself?
Do you really want to change your belief?
And finally, what would you rather believe?

And finally, I believe that if you’re not taking risks and things don’t go quite to plan (i.e failure – although I don’t really believe in failure – there are just opportunities to learn) you’re not really trying.

If you’re on your death bed and you’ve made no mistakes and no failures, it seems to me that was a rather flat and boring life.

So what risks can you take today? Or what can you say no to, that will open the door for something new to come along?

This week I’m closing my Indie Freedom Seekers community and mastermind that I launched in June 2018. In that time I’ve held fortnightly masterminds with some fabulous entrepreneurs, created a whole heap of online workbooks, tutorials and online courses and held a retreat day.

It’s been a fabulous journey, but now it’s time to say goodbye. So I’ve shut up shop, stopped people’s monthly recurring payments and this Friday will be our last ever mastermind.

I know it’s the right time to close it.

I took a risk launching it, and now I’m taking a risk closing it. And as one door closes another opens.

And so this month I launched a whole new business with Emmie Faust called Emmie + Debbie Ltd and we’re running our own community called the Growth Co Lab – it’s for ambitious female entrepreneurs who offer a service, so coaches, consultants, therapists, designers we mean you!