Today, I talked to an entrepreneur who’s a dentist. Over the last decade, he’s steadily grown the business to about 20 dental offices (each office does ~$1 million in annual revenue). To date, he’s used bank loans and hasn’t raised from investors, but he’s considering raising growth capital to accelerate growth and build his company to more than 100 locations.

During our chat, he shared that he recently stopped seeing patients. That decision completely changed his business. He realized that for many years he’d been a full-time dentist and a part-time CEO. He wasn’t giving the business the attention it needed. He didn’t have the bandwidth to work on long-term or strategic planning. He was too busy working in the business, seeing patients.

Now that he’s a full-time CEO, he sees the opportunity ahead of him more clearly, and he realizes he needs to raise eight figures of growth capital to turn his vision into reality.

His insight reminded me of the difference between working in the business and working on the business. For years after I started my company, I was deep in operations to keep the company going. Once I hired more people and removed myself from operations, we grew rapidly. I was finally able to think higher level and longer-term. I identified growth initiatives and focused on making those projects successful so the business could grow.

Like this dental entrepreneur, I didn’t realize for years that to grow my business, I needed to be working on it, not in it.