Starting and running your own small business is an amazing experience. But it can also lead to burnout if you’re not careful. Here are a few ways to prevent that and keep your love for your small business venture.
Almost a decade ago, I left my nice VP job start my own consulting business. It was a risk. I had always done well in big corporate America. My wife and I were raising four kids, and I was the sole financial provider. It seemed like a risky time to start something, but when the itch is there you’ve got to scratch it or it just keeps itching.
I told my wife that we’d do a “one-year experiment” – sure I’d end up back in another big company job. I started as a sole proprietor, but things grew fast, which was simultaneously awesome, exciting, scary, and really tiring. I incorporated a few years late and brought on a network of people who I could deploy as my business scaled and grew.
The business grew year over year every year for the first five years. It was an incredible adventure since I had never done this before. I certainly knew my subject matter for the services my company was providing, and I knew how to find good people to do key project work.
But then there was the laundry list of things I had never done before:
- I had never done business development before.
- I had never had to manage all of the day to day operations of a business before, including all the really fun stuff like tracking down unpaid invoices by being the nicest pest you can possibly be.
- I had never had to figure out a marketing strategy for a brand new business before.
- And not to come across like a complete Accounting imbecile, but the accounting, taxes, investments, and all of that stuff around running my business was more than I had done before. I, of course, leveraged lessons from my career and got the right partnerships with experts to help with that, which is good because otherwise I would have inevitably landed on the IRS’s hit list as a repeated tax code violator.
All of this to say that even with the excitement of running a successful small business by all intents and purposes, there’s a grind aspect to it that is inescapable. As my dad used to tell me:
“No matter how pretty the horse is, you’ve still got to clean the barn.”
My dad didn’t grow up on a horse ranch, so I have no idea how he come up with this analogy, but the message was clear. There’s always crap work to be done even in the most glamorous of small businesses. And that grindy work combined with the fact that the work never really stops when you run a small business can get you to an unintended end – burnout.
Getting The Balance Back
I’ve hit the point of burnout on several occasions. When I thought about what got me there, it wasn’t just the grind of the business itself. It was that things felt out of balance between my business and the rest of my life. When I have re-invigorated each time, it has been by getting things back into balance.
Here are three key lessons I’ve learned that have helped me keep the enthusiasm and energy needed to run a small business by finding that balance between work and life:
- Force compartmentalization
Running a small business can easily turn into a 24X7 thing. When it is yours to run, you get the flexibility of running it at any time. You also get the unintended consequence of the flexibility of running it at any time. And when it is yours to run, it never really stops. Even if you aren’t doing anything per se, you are thinking about your business. It can become all consuming.
I learned that the best way to mitigate this is to force compartmentalization. Work like a dog when you allocate time to do that, but then put it away and focus completely on something else – whether it is something just for you that has nothing to do with your business or your family.
- Ruthlessly prioritize
When you run your own business, it is easy to feel as though you have to do everything. That perception (and maybe even ability to actually pull it off) can lead to burnout since getting everything done all the time is ultimately unsustainable.
As a small business, the ability to prioritize becomes even more important than what I experienced working in big corporate America. There are simply fewer resources at your disposal (and we aren’t even close to successfully cloning ourselves), so we have to prioritize even more ruthlessly to keep our sanity and enthusiasm.
- Manage your “artificial urgency”
It is easy to make everything urgent when you run your own business, but the reality is that if we rise above what we are doing and look down on it from the treetop level, a lot of what we make urgent really isn’t. This “artificial urgency” can have an unintended and negative consequence in the short and long term. We inadvertently manufacture our own stress, and a lot of it isn’t necessary in the first place.
We all know the long-term negative effects of too much stress. Running a business comes with its own inherent stress. What I’ve learned to do is reduce the stress I’m causing myself that doesn’t need to be there by being more objective about how I ascribe urgency to things.
James Sudakow is the author of “Out of the Blur: A Delirious Dad’s Search for The Holy Grail of Work-Life Balance,” a humorous and practical guide for busy parents. He serves as the principal of CH Consulting, a boutique consulting practice that helps companies manage organizational transformation, maximize employee capabilities and improve business performance. Readers can visit his website and take the Work-Life Index, an assessment to find out if they are in control of their work-life balance or if their work and life are controlling them.
