Entrepreneurial Detachment: The Spiritual Side of Profit

Entrepreneurs often treat their business like their baby.

They love. Nurture. Watch and protect.

But unlike raising children, your business benefits from speed of execution. And the ability for entrepreneurs to “Let Go” and detach from these 5 core elements of business are keys to profit, learning and growth.

Working with clients for almost two decades, and having personally produced products such as books and seminar series, I know intimately the insidious time killer associated with perfectionism.

Getting caught up in making the blog post, marketing collateral, design, PR release and products just right can often see entrepreneurs cross the tipping point of actually improving something versus the time taken to improve it.

In economics, they call this the “Law of Diminishing Returns”. The time invested is not justified by the improvement made so it would have been better to ‘let it go’ and hit Publish, Send or Print at some point days, weeks or god forbid even months ago.

Creation comes with emotional attachment. It is intimately tied with human nature and the deep psychology we have.

Leadership and management don’t often spend time training staff on ‘letting go’ because the higher up the hierarchy you go, the greater the attachment levels as a general rule.

Learning to detach takes training.

It should be something we all practice.

With every product we create, try putting it out there when it’s saleable, nor perfect. You can involve your clients and customers in the improvement process and use it to enhance your brands ability to listen to your clients. Companies are not bagged on social media for listening and acting on customer feedback, only for silence and ignoring.

When designing your marketing collateral, there is a direct correlation between how many pieces you send out versus leads and sales that come back in. The ego gets caught up in producing the ‘perfect’ marketing piece. But the reality of execution and distribution is a key determining factor of your success. Taking twice and long and sending out half as much marketing could be dramatically stifling sales.

Now I’m not saying produce work that is not up to standard. But raise your awareness levels of that ‘Tipping Point’ where the amount of improvement is probably not justified by the time invested – and just send it out!

The spiritual side of business exists. It’s contained in trust, detachment, focus and awareness.

“You only lose what you cling to.” – Gautama Buddha

If you can sit down and focus exclusively to produce something of quality, trust yourself, your instincts and your understanding of the people you serve and sell to, and have the awareness of when to let go – and you will find a level of productivity and profits YOU may have been hanging onto all this time.