Lifestyle Business or Growth Business? [2021]

Well, now you have understood lifestyle business and growth business, let us consider the three important factors which will make it easier for you to make your decision on whether to choose a lifestyle business or a growth business.

Factors to consider to choose between lifestyle business vs growth business:

1.    Your Vision

2.   Your Goals

3.   Financing or Investment

1. Your Vision

It doesn’t matter whether you are starting a lifestyle business or a growth business, having made your vision clear is the most important factor in the success of your business. Vision is the one that decides where your business going to be in future.

Vision of your business should be drawn down and it should made as a first priority check in starting your business. Vision is the one decides where your business in future and how much growth that it is going to happen.

A business vision is a colorful and rich mental image what you want your business to be in future or at some point or over the coming years. It all depends upon the goals of your business and aspirations. By having a clear vision, you can stay focused on your business and helps you to stop heading in wrong direction.

Make your vision clear before starting your business. Your business strategy must be part of your vision. The best way to get started with is to write down a vision statement for your business. This all comes down to the point on how to define your business vision.

7 Steps to Define your Business Vision:

You can consider the following steps to define your business vision or your company vision.

1. Know your Company’s Goals

They say the goal setting is an art, which is completely true. That’s why setting appropriate goals is very important for starting your business. If you ask those who has already done this, they will definitely tell you that they have accomplished more than they even realized was possible. Setting goals with a vision not only where you plan to end up but also the steps that will get you there.

To establish your company’s vision, consider your goals which are focused on what are your strategies going to be and separate it from your endgame in creating your company vision.

2. Consider your Company’s Values

There is one more challenge you must consider before you define your company vision, which is defining your company’s values. A company values are the one’s either with one phrase words (e.g., futuristic, innovation, technology driven, communication, etc.) that defines how you do the business and how you run your business or long-tail keywords such as we teach all to become entrepreneurs or adding our footprints in the world of blogging.

Your company values are directly linked to your company goals, which both helps in creating your company vision. So, understand how you are going to do business, your business code of conduct, the way your goals and values interact with each other. This will immensely help you in setting up your company vision.

3. Define your Company’s Mission

To grow your business, vision is not just enough. To grow your business organically, you should define your mission statement which will be your alongside vision partner which will decide on jumping of your vision and business. Just consider, where you company is in the present before you move on to your vision. Consider goals, values and vision together to create your mission statement.

4. Keep your Vision Simple

Whatever business you run, keep your vision simple and clear as much as possible. Having a simple vision benefits you in two aspects of your business journey.

Firstly, having a simple vision helps your employees to understand easily and support exactly as you require them to be to reach your vision. If the vision is complicated, it’s obviously difficult for anyone to get digested and accomplish. Secondly, keeping your vision simple, makes it easier for you to achieve and reach your goals easily so that you can turn your vision into a reality.

Having a complicated vision, makes you to run into multiple directions which will result in failure of your company goals.

5. Avoid being Ambiguous

This is by far the difficult step as you will be drawing and listing out all of your desires at one place based on what you are actively accomplishing on a day-to-day basis, but make no mistake in being specific. This means, the vision you draw should be simple, clear and can be easily shown to the independent observers around you, in return when asked they will come up with the same interpretation as yours.

Hence keeping the vision simple helps greatly in staving off ambiguity. The reason is simple, ambiguity is what makes it difficult for both employees and you to turn your vision into reality.

6. Be a Forward Thinker

Make yourself clear that you define your vision based on your mission as they both go hand in hand. It is always worth reiterating that your vision should be forward thinking. To be precise, you must think of your industry landscape future, where it’s going to be? what it’s going to be? what is the future of your company?

Forward thinking based vision of your company, helps you decide on how much your business is sustainable and how much it can be scalable in future. A vision written must address the rapid growth of your business in future, risks that incur are addressed and the changing market.

7. Establish Timeframes

Your vision for your business should not be limited to future forward thinking, it must also look into the timeline. Thus, draw and have a timeline that intends to focus on meeting certain milestones. These milestones are directly linked to the concrete goal’s deliverables.

This is a place where the ideas of creating a vision and setting goals for your business intersect with each other. The result is that, both requires a timeline. Goals can also be made as sub-goals or smaller goals that cater around your business milestones or vision milestones.

2. Your Goals

The other important factor between deciding on a lifestyle business and growth business is that, setting your goals. This is the place where the soul-searching is required to find out what are your personal goals? what are your company’s goals? what are your business goals?

Along with setting goals, what you want to accomplish is the key important factor in deciding a lifestyle business vs growth business.

You can say that, the growth businesses are more demanding businesses to start. This is for the fact that, the growth businesses require commitments of your both time and resources. In short, to achieve an accelerated growth in the rapidly changing market environment, you are more likely to going to sacrifice many things, such as your quality of life, time off’s and more importantly, any disconnection from your business.

But, on the other hand the lifestyle businesses are businesses that are started with a primary goal of helping and supporting an entrepreneur to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. The profits in lifestyle businesses may be less when compared to growth businesses. However, the quality of life is high and allows you to have a better work-life-balance, which in-turn allows you the ability to put on multiple other interests such as travelling, YouTuber and so on.

Is this mean that a growth business won’t help you to have the option of a lifestyle that you want. The answer is no. A growth business at the beginning may not give you the option of enjoying your lifestyle. But, once settled down you can enjoy your lifestyle with multiple interests, such as a vacation or a travel.

No matter which business you start a growth business or a lifestyle business, both gives you the option of emerging as an entrepreneur. It’s best to get advice from those who are already masters in these fields which will easily help you to make your decision.

3. Financing or Investment

It doesn’t matter which business you are starting, a lifestyle business or a growth business, both needs capital or investment to get started. And you need more capital the moment you decide to scale up your business or just to keep your business running all the time.

The best part of growth businesses is that, it easily attracts investors from across the world who will be willing to invest on your business and products as they know they are going to get returns as there is a growth in your business.

However, on the other hand, the lifestyle businesses are usually running by an individual or family members which won’t attract investments easily from the outside world apart from your family or relatives.

You may ask us, why this is so? Well, the growth businesses are hyper-focused on growth which is backed with a detailed business plan and projections for next few years on revenues and profits. The growth businesses eventually require investments form around the world to meet the aggressive goals and customer demands in their niche industry. Well, the investors know that they are going to get returns after few years as per the terms which is going to be hug reward on their investment.

On the other hand, the lifestyle businesses take lot of time to get investments. Rather than supporting growth through outside investments, lifestyle businesses typically increase their capital with debt financing.

Lifestyle Entrepreneur vs Growth Entrepreneur

Now we know exactly what is lifestyle business vs growth entrepreneur, now it’s time to understand difference between lifestyle entrepreneur vs growth entrepreneur.

The main difference between a lifestyle entrepreneur and a growth entrepreneur is that, a lifestyle entrepreneur runs and optimizes his lifestyle business for his or her lifestyle to live a better lifestyle so to have better work-balance. On the other hand, a growth entrepreneur completely focuses on growth at any reasonable at any cost.

Take a look at the following considerations upon which the lifestyle entrepreneur differs from the growth entrepreneur:

1.    Lifestyle entrepreneurs looks and focuses on company’s profitability for their personal income, without neglecting the growth goals. While the growth entrepreneurs put all of their efforts and emphasis on growth.

2.   Lifestyle entrepreneurs never look for investments from outside, whereas the growth entrepreneurs always look for investments to achieve the company’s growth goals.

3.   Lifestyle entrepreneurs are extremely comfortable with their status quo. However, the growth entrepreneurs always look to shake things up, innovate, re-invent and run behind their business to grow faster.

4.   Lifestyle entrepreneurs are usually an individual or just family members, whereas the growth entrepreneurs are more than individual even multiple groups of people who are willing to invest and grow their business faster.

Conclusion

Hope this article has helped you out in deeply understanding a lifestyle business and a growth business. It doesn’t matter whether you start a lifestyle business vs growth business, once you made your choice of running a business, it all comes down to the fact that you need to develop a strategic business plan, understand the changing market, find out your niche, determine the initial investments, identify targeted customers and then create a brand to become an entrepreneur.

You need to make your choices over a lifestyle entrepreneur or a growth entrepreneur depending upon your type of entrepreneurship. It all comes down to the vision, mission, goals, values and so on to make any business successful.