The potentials ahead are unlimited. Doors to open and discoveries to be made, and all kinds of things awaiting to enrich the life and bring prosperity.

But wait… what is this? Bramble bushes and pinnacles in front of every door. Debris to clear, blocks to scale, and then, keys to find and a heavy door to pry open. The opportunity comes with a good deal of work prior to even being able to BEGIN to benefit from it!

We decided to upgrade from a reseller account to a dedicated server. Three reseller accounts, actually – it was time! Having a dedicated server will open some more doors for us and allow us to offer more to our students and trainees. A good thing.

But oh, the work involved! And still more work to do before we can truly realize the potential of the move.

I recently assisted a client in making a similar leap forward. She had reached a wall – she could no longer go forward. But opening the door to further growth for her meant purchasing a reseller account – and doing that meant a new learning curve, setting up some new software, and investing in some additional training and resources.

Of course, such things tend to become urgent when we feel we do not have the time for it! We seem to be required to invest in an upgrade when our finances are most stressed, to learn a new thing when time is the most short, and to create new marketing materials to capitalize on a new market when we are buried under a load of troubleshooting tasks that demand a lot of time but give little monetary return! If we don’t handle these things though, and if we always procrastinate the extra work to realize new potentials, we stay stuck, mired in mediocrity.

We’ve worked with a lot of small businesses. We find that many of them stay stuck in reacting – they are so busy coping with day to day demands that they feel they do not have time to move to a more manageable system. They cannot implement simple automation to reduce the time they are spending on repetitive tasks, because they are so busy performing those repetitive tasks that they have no time to eliminate them! They are working so hard for so little money, that they have no funds available to invest in an improvement that would allow them to make more money in less time. A nasty little trap that is easy to get into – and a large reason why small business owners burn out and crash the business when they reach a certain phase of growth.

If you want to open a door to new opportunity, you HAVE to figure out a way to do the extra temporarily, that will make the business either more manageable, or more lucrative. Investing in something that moves you forward is worth it – paying for things which only promise “credibility” is NOT worth it. But paying for TOOLS, that measurably help you earn more than the tool costs, is always worth it. Doing extra work, or taking the time to learn something new, is also always worth it when the result is more work in less time, or the opportunity to engage in business areas that you have a demand for, but which you cannot do unless you make the leap.

I think that the move we made has been a hard one. But it is a good choice – even though our expenses go up temporarily, and the learning curve is steep. The potentials to capitalize on new markets where we will have no competition for quite a while, and to enhance what we already offer, are too good to pass up. And we can ONLY get them by investing the time and resources to DO it.

Definitely a burden. But definitely one that will pay for itself.