How to Fall Back In Love With Your Businesss
I've been chatting with so many of my clients over the past couple of weeks and one of the things that you keep telling me, and I hear this in all industries across the board, is that you're burned out, you're tired, you don't know what to do with your business.
I talk to you guys mostly about your books and your finances, but when we get to talk about other things and I get to know you better, it’s one of my favorite things. In my business, I get to meet all kinds of different people all across the world, and one of the things that I keep hearing from you guys is “I'm stressed!” So, I thought that it was kind of fitting for me to just take a minute, get away from the books, and we're just going to talk about business and the mindset you’re in. Because if your mindset isn't right you're not going to focus on your money anyway, right?
I'm going to tell you a little bit about my journey as a business owner and why I do the things that I do. And honestly, I've been in your shoes. So if you're tired, stressed out, and you're ready to just throw the towel in - I have been there, but I'm not there anymore - let me show you how to fall back in love with your business.
I want to give you a little bit of an analogy. Think about when you started your business as you starting a new relationship. In any relationship, you're all excited in the beginning, right? You are savoring every moment, you jump out of bed in the morning, and you can't wait to see that significant other. You're going to get all dressed up and excited, and I refer to that as the honeymoon phase. Your business has one of those too! So when you first start your business, you can't wait to dive into new ideas and marketing, and you have all these things that you're going to do.
And then... reality sets in.
You discover that not all parts of that relationship that I was telling you about before last. They’re not as exciting and fantastic as you thought they were going to be or used to be. Everything had this beautiful cover on it, and you put it in this beautiful little box. But then, as you start working with it, you're like, huh, I don't know about that. You realize that in business, maybe some parts are just stale and they're boring.
Maybe your numbers or some parts of your business test your patience. About 10 years ago, maybe more than that, one of my big prayers was for patience. It had nothing to do with business, but that was one thing that I prayed about. And I'll promise you this: when you pray for things, God doesn't just say, ‘Oh, here you go. Here’s some patience.’ I know what he did for me was put situations in my life to teach me to have patience.
Then maybe there are some parts of it that are just really challenging to you. You Google lots of things, but it seems like nothing's working out. You just don't get it, or it doesn't make sense to you. Some things on this list for me:
Technology, for me, is boring. I can handle it, but it's boring. Bookkeeping, for me, is not one of the things that when I started a business I thought I was going to hate, and I still don’t - I love bookkeeping, thank goodness, right? But maybe for you, it's one of those things that you just cannot grasp the concept of.
What about working with clients? Some people are very introverted and they don't like dealing with their clients day-to-day - I'm not one of those people. I can sit on the phone all day with my clients and it's great! It doesn't wear me out and it gives me energy to talk to clients.
What about marketing? I really thought that I was going to enjoy marketing! Well, the more time I spent in marketing, the more I realized that it was something that tested my patience. Playing with Canva was all cool, but it tested my patience because I have better things to do with my time.
So when you get into this situation and the reality sets in… you think, ‘Oh crap. I'm a business owner. All these things are now on my shoulders.’ I feel it. Being a mama is one thing, adding a business owner to it is another whole level of stress.
So with that, what do you do? Do you say ‘forget this’ and ‘I’m going back to my nine to five?’ Or do we take steps to fall back in love with our business? Before you throw the towel in, and I know some of you are on the verge because you told me that this week, don't do it yet. Hold on just a little bit longer.
I'm going to give you six tools or six little strategies that I want you to implement to hopefully get you to fall in love with your business again.
#1 - Remember Why You Started
Why did you start this business in the first place? Remember way back, and this may have been just a couple of weeks ago for you - who knows. My ‘why’ 11 years ago was that I was a second-generation accountant - so my mother was an accountant, I was pregnant with my youngest child and I was working in the business. It was a family business, and my mother was going through chemo for breast cancer. She's fine now, but she came to me one day and she said, “You know what? I'm done with this business. You have a baby, and I want to be a full-time grandma. So how about we make a deal? How about you take over the reins of the business, and I'm going to enjoy the littlest.’”
Why would I not do that? Right? My littlest was always sick in daycare, I was always having to take him out anyway. So, it was perfect timing. It was time for her to retire, and it was great that I had someone who could watch my baby right?
So, that was my ‘why’ 11 years ago. Well, fast forward to March 2020, COVID strikes, and my business started shifting. I was able to work from home for a couple of weeks, and when I did, I realized I had been missing out on so much of my children's life. They go to school for eight hours a day, they come home, we do homework, we cook and eat dinner, most of the time. Then I'm still working even after I get home from being at work from eight to five or six, and I was missing out on their life. Plain and simple.
That became the moment that I said I can work from home, and COVID showed me that I could do that right. So for many of you, and my prayers are for you, COVID struck you or your family in a bad way. For me and my family, COVID was an extreme blessing because it showed us a different way of life.
Fast forward a little bit, I hired a business coach to tell me how to do this, because I had never run a business online. I went to work every day from nine to five. How do you convert that? So my husband and I thought and prayed about this and decided to invest in a coach. And it was a big investment, but it was worth it. Now I'm home with my kids, and I can homeschool them.
#2 - Identify Three Key Issues In Your Business
I posted a post on Groundhog Day about how a lot of us spend our days going through the ‘groundhog syndrome’ - you do the same thing over and over and over again and you get nowhere. I told you to take account of all the things that you do during your day, and I want you to put them into these different buckets:
I enjoy the task and it brings value to my business.
I enjoy the task, but it really doesn't have any value in my business.
I don't like it. I don't enjoy it. But it still brings value to my business and has to be done.
It doesn't bring me joy, doesn't give me any happiness. And it does not bring my business any value.
Here are a few of my own examples:
Number one - what do I like to do and also brings value. Well, I love crunching numbers. Go figure right?
Number two, what I've really enjoyed, what I've learned, is that I enjoy talking to you about your business, not necessarily just about the finance part. That's great, but that's what's ingrained in me. But I enjoy talking to you about your business, helping your business grow, helping you learn the things that I've learned from my business coach, trial and error, all these different things. I love helping other people with our business.
For bucket three, probably scrolling Facebook. I enjoy doing that. I know that sounds really silly, but I do! It’s almost de-stressing for me, that I can read other people's posts. But at the end of the day, does it help me at all my business? Probably not. Okay, so I need to do a little less of those things. More of the things I really like and value, little less than things that I enjoy but have no value.
And then the fourth thing is I don't enjoy it, but it brings out like I know it has to be done. That for me is going to be marketing. I don't really enjoy making things on Canva and posting all these posts and things of that nature. I don't really like it, but I know that it has to be done in my business.
Guess what I did with those things? Outsource! If you don't like it, outsource it.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and throw this out here: I hear it all the time. “I can't afford to delegate.” I had been that girl, but had I said that back in August about my business coach, that I'm just gonna have to figure this out on my own? I would be stuck. I wouldn't even know how to stream from Streamyard right now and how to set up my processes. But I hired someone who knew what she was doing. She was a professional in the business. She had done it. She had gone from a brick-and-mortar accounting business to working online.
Why would I not pay her for her knowledge? It makes sense. So, you have to learn what to invest in. Do the things you love, invest in your business to delegate and outsource the rest? So how do you know when you need to outsource something? Well, it has to bring value to your business. So don't just outsource to outsource. It has to bring value to your business. And it has to be something that you don't like or you're totally confused about. Remember, I posted before ‘how many hours have you spent Googling something just to go around and around the world and never even come up with a solution anyway.’ What could you have spent those hours on? Working with your clients, or doing the things that you enjoy doing? Don't trade your time for money. That's what you were doing when you were punching a clock for your employer. Another way to know when it’s the right thing to outsource is if you’re thinking ‘this is boring.’ It’s dragging you down, and you don't see any point in doing it.
#4 - Streamline Your Processes
I have always been a one-man show with an assistant, but for the most part, I did most of the work. They would answer the phones, and filing, and things of that nature. But if something had happened to me, forget it, because everything was up here in my head, and nothing was written down.
So one of the things that we worked on when I hired my coach was setting up SOPs. You need to figure out where you are hitting your roadblocks. What are things that you do every day in your business that you have to do for your business to survive, where you woke up tomorrow and you had the flu, and you had to ask your husband or your significant other somebody to come in and sit at your chair and run your business, could they do it?
If it’s in a system, they can follow all the steps. And what that allows me to do too, is to delegate those tasks. So when you get larger, and that's the whole point when you become an entrepreneur, you want to eventually have it where your hands are off, and other people are helping you run your business. So you have to have those SOPs and the proper tools in place.
#5 - Working ON Your Business Instead of Always IN Your Business
What is the difference? Working in your business means that you're always in the middle of something. You're selling things, you're booking appointments, you're talking to your clients, you are setting up contracts, you're always busy doing something.
You need to start looking at it from a CEO or business owner’s perspective and set realistic goals. It’s important to create a roadmap of where you are right now in your business, where you want to be in the next 30 days, next six months, the next year, five years. You don't just get your car and randomly just drive around, right?
And then, I want you to schedule weekly time to work on your business. Schedule it, put it in your calendar, you have a meeting with yourself. I have a meeting with myself every Monday. I don't answer emails on Mondays. I don't return client calls on Monday. Monday is my day to work on my business.
#6 - Remember the Good Stuff
When you started your business everything was grande, right in the very beginning. You were on your own cloud nine, right? And along the way you've had some good moments - maybe you were able to invest in something, like the cool gadget that you've always wanted. Maybe it's the new pair of pumps that you want or a new purse. Those are the good things that I want you to remember that your business was able to afford you. For me right now, my business is able to afford me more time with my kids and more time with my husband. I'm able to homeschool my children. Don't focus on the bad so much. We just have a habit of that. I'm bad about it, too, my husband tells me all the time.
Another thing I want you to do in remembering the good stuff is I want you to step outside of your box a little bit. And this was very, very, very, very hard for me in the beginning. I've been going live with you guys just about every Monday now for four months. And it was very difficult for me because this is way out of my comfort zone. It still is every now and then, but the fact that I showed up today with barely any makeup on, is great.
One more great thing is making friends with new people. So, I want you to reach out to people, maybe it's me, maybe it's other people in this group. Maybe it's people in other Facebook groups. But guys, social media gives you a window of opportunity to so many different people. And those people can hold you accountable. They can give you their story and maybe you can get value from their story.
So - I want you to remember why you started, invest in yourself and your business, streamline your processes, take the time to work on your business instead of just working in it, and remember the good stuff!
