Your Path to Make “Someday” Today
September has always felt a little like a second New Year.
Summer vacations are winding down. Kids and grandkids are heading back to school. Calendars become more predictable. Routines return.
And for many people, there is suddenly a little more time and structure in the week.
That makes September a natural time to take stock.
What do you want the rest of this year to look like? What have you been putting off? And perhaps more importantly, what have you been telling yourself you’ll get around to “someday”?
If you’ve ever thought about business ownership, that last question can be particularly important.
Because one of the biggest obstacles to becoming a business owner has nothing to do with money, risk, experience, or finding the right opportunity.
It’s just easier to keep doing what you are already doing.
Complacency Doesn’t Always Look Like Complacency
When you hear the word complacent, you may tend to picture someone who has stopped trying.
But I think complacency can look very different.
Most of the people I work with are anything but lazy or unmotivated. They are successful, responsible people with demanding careers and full lives. They are busy.
They answer every email. Attend every meeting. Hit their goals. Take care of their families. Volunteer. Travel. Manage projects at home and responsibilities at work.
The danger isn’t that you are doing nothing. It’s that you can stay very busy doing everything except evaluating whether you are still on the path you want to be on.
This is even easier when things are going reasonably well.
If your career were an absolute disaster, change might be more on your radar. You would have a compelling reason to do something different.
But what if your career is fine?
You make good money. You’ve earned respect. You’re good at what you do. Maybe you even like parts of it.
At the same time, you may have started wondering what it would be like to have more control over your schedule. Or to build an asset of your own. Or to have greater financial upside. Or simply to spend the next chapter of your career doing something different.
Nothing is necessarily wrong. But that doesn’t mean nothing should change.
The Status Quo Perpetuates Itself
If you want to continue in your current career for another year, you probably don’t need to make that decision today. You just need to wake up tomorrow and go to work.
Exploring something different requires action.
You have to make room for it. You have to spend some time learning. You have to ask questions. You have to think about your finances, goals, risk tolerance, lifestyle, and what you would actually want from a business.
And there will always be a reason not to do that right now.
Maybe after this big project at work.
Maybe after the holidays.
Maybe when the kids get through this school year.
Maybe when the economy feels more predictable.
Maybe next year.
Those can be legitimate reasons to delay making a major change.
But there is an important difference between deciding that the timing isn’t right to become a business owner and repeatedly postponing the process of finding out whether you might want to become one.
Prioritize the Question, Not the Answer
I think people sometimes put unnecessary pressure on themselves when they consider business ownership.
Exploring business ownership does not require deciding that you are going to become a business owner.
Those are two very different decisions.
You might investigate franchising and determine that it isn’t right for you.
You might decide you like the idea, but the timing isn’t right.
You might discover that the kinds of businesses you assumed you would be interested in aren’t actually a good fit.
Or you might discover opportunities you didn’t even know existed and realize that ownership is more realistic than you thought.
All of those are useful outcomes.
The commitment isn’t to ownership.
The commitment is to exploration.
Give yourself permission to investigate the question without requiring yourself to know the answer before you begin.
Put the Question on the Calendar
We prioritize important things by making room for them.
Important meetings go on the calendar. So do doctor’s appointments, family events, vacations, workouts, and everything else we have decided deserves some of our time.
Yet some of the biggest questions about our own lives can remain indefinitely in the category of I’ll get to that eventually.
If business ownership has been one of those questions for you, perhaps September is a good time to change that.
Not because you need to quit your job.
Not because you need to buy a franchise.
And not because September is magically the right time to make a major life change (though psychology says it is).
But because you’ve got about four months left in the year, summer is behind you, routines are returning, and there’s still plenty of time to learn something about what your next chapter could look like.
Maybe the question isn’t whether now is the perfect time to become a business owner. Maybe it’s whether you’ve postponed finding out long enough. Let’s connect and put that curiosity on the calendar.
