Member Article

Yorkshire Entrepreneur Launches Programme For Peers To Save History Repeating Itself

This month sees a leading business mentor and entrepreneur launch a new service for his peers after a recent study provided scientific proof that ‘buying time back’ makes us happier. The new programme Freedom to choose is intended to help entrepreneurs achieve financial freedom, to enable them to ‘buy time back’, through generating an extra £5,000 each month.

Created for entrepreneurs who are struggling to make their business plans materialise into the success they’d dreamed of, Leeds-based entrepreneur Gary King, Managing Director of Tendo and Regional Head of the Association of Business Mentors has this month launched a new programme, Freedom to choose, to help fellow business owners take control back of their lives and to guide decisions to increase profitability, productivity and flexibility in their business. It will run as an online self-serve business course, in group workshop format and as 121 business mentoring.

Featuring an interactive calculator which helps you discover how much your aspirational lifestyle costs and what needs to be done to achieve it, Freedom to choose encourages goal setting focused on achieving financial freedom.

Gary said: “With stats highlighting that 1 in 5 business owners miss pay day to survive and 19% rely on their personal savings, the financial stability of the UK’s SMEs is in question. I know I made these mistakes too in the early days - it’s actually widely considered to just be a part of building a business - but how ridiculous is that?”

Gary is evolving his own business, after the realisation that it wasn’t delivering what he wanted from it and Freedom to choose has been established to help others take a fresh look at why they get up in the morning.

Gary knows first hand of the struggles of an entrepreneur admitting that he spent the first few years building the wrong business, filing his expenses at 1am and missing his son’s football matches to try to keep on top of work. Through Tendo, Gary has now supported hundreds of other business owners who have been through the same pain. Having had his own epiphany around 2.5 years ago after working with a business mentor himself, he now runs Tendo, alongside being a director of two other businesses, all while working a four-day week.

Gary said: “This latest study confirms what I already knew – outsourcing the jobs you hate not only makes you happier, but can revolutionise your business and your life. No one gets into business to work longer hours for less money, but that’s what happens for a high number of business owners. Most business owners only spend 40% of their time client facing doing what they love. The remaining time is doing all the other stuff that comes with running a business.”

“The turning point for my business was when I finally realised that I should be paying people to do all the jobs I hated – and that took up loads of my time. It’s a common myth that you have to do everything in your business. Once I was brave enough to do outsource time consuming tasks to experts, I could concentrate on the things about my business that I loved, and that shift quickly converted into winning more business and making more money.”

“As business owners we instantly recognise the idea of time famine, but it’s only by being confident in the decision to hire other people – whether that’s in house or using freelancers or other small businesses – that we break that destructive cycle and really start to make our businesses fly. Of course, we need to be able to fund this resource but without the money to do it, business owners often feel trapped.”

“What I’ve discovered as the most valuable thing we can work towards, is having the freedom to choose. Freedom to choose when to work, and when to spend time with friends and family; freedom to choose what to earn, and how to spend it, and freedom to choose how big you really want your business to get.”

This is what Gary’s new Freedom to choose programme facilitates, based on four simple steps that have turned Gary’s business and life around:- Building the right business – step one is making sure that the business you’re growing is the right one to deliver you the time and freedom to do what you want, not tie you down and have you questioning if you have done the right thing.

Creating financial freedom – step two is based around understanding what your goals are and defining an exact number for what financial freedom looks like, something Gary insists is a critical step to success. He says “You don’t have to be a millionaire to achieve financial freedom, far from it - a few extra invoices and better pricing each month could be all it takes to have a truly different life to what you have now.”

Growing the right team – step three is based on the premise that you will never be totally free to choose if you have to do everything yourself and looks at what tasks you can hand over to a trusted team, creating time and head space for you to grow your business.

Giving yourself choice – step four is the fun bit of choosing what happens next, as Gary encourages clients to think about how you want to grow your business - franchise it? Sell it? Or take incremental growth? He stresses that what’s important is that you have the power to make those choices, rather than the business doing so.

Gary adds,“I don’t want to see any more entrepreneurs struggle. It’s perfectly possible to define and then create your dream lifestyle, you just need to know how. I want to help business owners have that dream holiday and not have to take the laptop to the beach”. You can find out more via Facebook @TendoFreedomtochoose where you can also access immediate business tips, advice and inspiration.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Chocolate PR .