Feel Like Your Business Has Stolen Your Life? Here’s How To Get It Back.

Whether you own a business or not, you’ve probably dreamed about the freedom and exceptional lifestyle being a business owner guarantees (at least in the movies).

If you actually chased that dream there is a good chance that you soon realized that the movies lie (it’s their job, don’t get mad.)

The good news is if you feel overwhelmed and stressed, are missing time with your family, and are tired of worrying about making payroll or paying vendors, there are some straightforward ways to get that under control that don’t require a cape or movie star looks.

If you are a business owner and constantly feel overwhelmed, it’s most likely because each day arrives and you don’t have a plan for how to deal with it, and neither do the people that work for you. If you feel like you are constantly putting out fires instead of growing your business, it’s time to create systems and standards so people understand their jobs and can be more effective(including you).

Ask yourself a question right now. How long could you step away from your business without hurting its success? An hour? A day? A week? A month or more?

If your answer was a resounding “are you nuts?” to any of those, your business owns you, you don’t own your business, and systems and standards will be your new best friend.

If your business owns you, it’s because you have concentrated on day to day events rather than building a sustainable growing business model, and that needs to change. Today.

Accept this now, if every customer needs to talk to, touch, see, or deal with you, you do not have a business you have created yourself a job.

Nobody will buy your business because you are your business. Want to finance growth? A bank realizes your business’ growth potential is limited to what you can personally handle and oversee.

If your goal is to build a business that makes you money, gives you the lifestyle you want, and can someday be sold or handed off to someone else, then you need to start thinking in terms of repeatable, standardized, systems as being the lifeblood of your business instead of yourself.

So you are already overwhelmed, stressed, and under-motivated by the state of your current business so where do you start?

What’s the one thing you say “I wish I didn’t have to do this” about every day? Start there. Think you can’t? You’re wrong. You learned it, that means someone else can too.

When I started my business I believed nobody could develop client strategies  except for me. Turns out that was more ego and lack of information that truth.

We now have checklists and step by step processes for many strategic processes that I used to think I always had to do myself. When I sat back and put my ego aside, I realized I learned everything I was doing from someone else, and if they could teach me, then I could teach someone else.

Equally importantly having systems and checklists have even made me more effective at the work I choose to do in our company as well. There is no chance that I accidentally skip a step or miss an important detail (or a minor one) that is going to lead to doing work over or answering additional client emails.

You don’t make mistakes that cost you time? You are a liar. And worse than that, the mistakes will snowball and increase the more overwhelemed you let yourself get, so address it now.

Think you are the only one that can onboard clients? You’re wrong. Think you are the only one they want to talk to you? Wrong again. Your clients and customers want results, value, consistency, and great experiences. Guess what you won’t be giving them soon if you keep letting yourself get buried?

Business owners inevitably think they have to be everything their customers could possibly want. When I started my first business I bought every interesting piece of equipment that I came accross because it would allow me to offer yet another service. Shockingly the $2000 windshield polisher has yet to pay for itself nearly 15 years later.

This isn’t just about wasting capital, it’s also about wasting time. Be the best at what you do. That’s why you started your business. You believed you could do something well enough that people would give you their money instead of giving it to someone else.

Now instead of making the best tomato sauce in Topeka, you used to make the best because trying to make the best salsa, pasta, pickles, and home basket weaving kits that random customers asked for has taken your attention away from where it belongs.

Be the best at what you are the best at, charge more, get better marketing, put systems in place so people can do the work for you, and suddenly the life you’ve been wanting will appear.

If there is a piece of your business you can’t delegate, than you haven’t created a good enough system yet, get back to work. If you can’t delegate, your business still owns you.

Additionally, if you haven’t started automating pieces of your business yet, you are wasting time and money, and falling behind your competition.

Email, phone, and text communication can all be partially automated fairly easily now at very low cost. Managing and maintaining social media accounts, advertising online, and managing your schedule and calendar, same story.

Bookkeeping, investing, payroll, the list goes on and on.

If you just asked yourself what I could possibly be talking about, make Google your new best friend or reach out to me and I’ll be happy to give you some guidance.

If you don’t have scheduled time 100% away from your business, you are doing it wrong, and your business owns you.

If you aren’t taking time to do the things you love, spend time with the people you love, get some sunshine and exercise, and experience new things, you aren’t living your live anymore.

More importantly if you aren’t doing those things, your creativity is gone, your passion is gone, your energy is dwindling, and you no longer have the things that you used to create your business in the first place.

You can’t effectively grow your business if you are only a shadow of yourself.

You are more important than any meeting, any phone call, any bookeeping, it’s time to start treating yourself like it.

These four simple things will change your business and your life.

I know it because I was the burned out business owner desperate to get the life he expected, and that desperation leads down a road fraught with mistakes, stress, and bad decisions I promise you.

Put yourself first and create a business that you are in control of instead of the other way around, and live the life you always expected.

Source: Growing Your Business: Why Knowing Where Your Customer Spends Their Time Is More Important Than Ever