Episode #13: Managing Entrepreneur Syndrome:

And so it's actually something that you need to be aware of when you're in your forties and fifties before it gets to be a very serious situation in your sixties and seventies.

Entrepreneur syndrome is when all you do is invest in business after business after business.

In doing so, what you're often doing is creating value in income.

You're creating a growth in income, but you're not necessarily creating long-term wealth unless you are able to sell one of your businesses for a significant chunk of money.

And so where this becomes a real problem is later in life when either you're starting to slow down, or you are considering retirement, or a health concern pops up.

Because now you have a business that may be pumping income.

Like, you know, I have clients with, you know, many millions of dollars in, of income and revenue in a business, but if they're not saving and they're not creating value for themselves outside the business, then what can happen is you have a health scare.

You can no longer run that business, and it's probably a small business.

Maybe you're the only employee, maybe there's one or two employees, but it all runs through you, and now you cannot operate that business.

And so your whole sort of net worth was wrapped up in the business.

Now that business's income is going to plummet, and meanwhile, you don't have resources to protect yourself.

Not to mention, the business now suffers.

If you were planning on selling that business, then it won't be worth nearly as much as y- it was going to be if you were able to operate on a regular basis in the business.

And so this creates a problem later in life, and it's really understandable of how it builds.

You know, when you're an entrepreneur or you run a solo business, you have a firm belief that you can turn a dollar here into two dollars or three dollars or four dollars here, and you can do it better than anything else that you're investing in.

So you just continue to invest in you, you invest in the business, and the business, business enterprises.

And that can really work out.

It can also not if those businesses don't eventually sell or you're not creating wealth outside of those businesses.

What results oftentimes is that you create a lot of income, but very little security.

And so when the business security goes, your income goes, your protection goes, and, um, it can create a real dire situation.

And so you need to protect against this.

And that's really what I want to discuss today, is sort of how to protect against that natural urge to only invest in the business and only try and grow the business.