Your business is good, but it is wearing you out
Although your customers praise the work and your weeks run long, the money your business earns has stayed at the level it first reached several years ago. If that description fits you, then whatever you are short of is unlikely to be effort, because your week has been full for as long as you can remember.
Why a fuller week stopped paying more
What you earn from a week depends on the kind of work that fills it, and the number of hours you put in matters far less. Nobody sets those kinds of work out for you when you start a business, so the obvious answer to earnings that have stopped rising is usually to work more of the same hours. Suppose that two owners each work a sixty-hour week, and that one of them makes the product with her own hands while the other decides what her company builds and who it serves. Both weeks cost their owners the same sixty hours, and the second owner earns more. How much an hour of work is worth tends to depend on how many people receive the value of it, and on how hard the person working it would be to replace.
The four kinds of work a week can hold
Every article in this study measures the work against one ladder of four levels, which I call the four levels of value. The bottom level is implementation, which is the work you do with your own hands. However skilled you become at it, an hour of implementation still serves a single customer. The top level is imagination, which is the deciding of what the business builds and who it builds for. Everybody else in the company spends their hours carrying out those decisions, which is why one hour of imagination can pay for so many of theirs. The ladder holds two further levels between those two ends, and each level you climb changes how many people receive the value of a single hour of your work.
Most of what you earn depends on where your week falls on that ladder, and each step up the ladder asks something different of you.
What wealth means here
Wealth, in this study, means the distance between the value your business delivers to its customers and the hours you personally spend producing that value. An owner working at implementation keeps that distance at zero, however skilled she becomes at the work itself. That is why the craft which started your business cannot, on its own, grow it.
The subject of this study is the working week that produces the money in the first place, so markets, investments, and the question of where to put money once you have it all belong somewhere else.
What you will know by the end
The subject takes five articles because it divides into a diagnosis, a map, and three separate climbs. A summary of a climb would tell you where it ends up while leaving out how you would make it, so each climb has an article of its own. By the end of the study you will know which level your own week is on, what staying on it is costing you, and what moving up from it would take.