It's not uncommon for business owners to lose a bit of control of their businesses. What's important is you get that control back.
When answering the question “who’s in charge: you or the business?”, you need to ask yourself who is controlling who.
Are you taking charge and ensuring that your business is following the aims and strategies it should be, or is the business taking over with its time consuming and administrative tasks?
How to work out who’s in charge
There are a few questions to ask yourself to really establish who is running the show in your business. Once you’ve identified who is in charge, you can work on ensuring that you’re the one in the driving seat.
1 – Stress: How stressed are you and do you feel burnt out?
If you regularly feel stressed about work with a constant burn out feeling, the chances are that your business is in charge of you, rather than the other way around, because you don’t have the upper hand on your workload, for example.
2 – Free time: How much free time do you have, and are you constantly thinking about work in your free time?
Do you barely have any free time? And when you do have free time are you thinking about work? If so, it may be time to reconsider the power relationship between you and your business.
3 – Goals: are you meeting your goals and making time to analyse them?
Similarly, are you constantly chasing the next win, even if it’s a small win that doesn’t contribute to your overall success?
If your goals are to clear your emails, or to sort your HR documents, without having the time to consider if that’s where your focus should be, you may not have total control over your business. But that’s okay, this blog is here to help, not to shame business owners.
What the above three questions are going to do is establish whether or not you are happy. You started your own business with levels of excitement and aspiration, and that shouldn’t have to disappear.
How your business can easily take charge of you
As we said, this blog isn’t here to shame any business owners if their businesses have got the better of them. We’re here to help and reassure you that having periods where your business is in charge of you is common.
It can easily come about for business owners, especially small businesses, where there are too many tasks to focus on with little room for outsourcing. In addition, in order to ensure profit, you may struggle to say no to client requests, giving yourself impossible deadlines to meet.
Particularly in a year such as 2020, where regular income has been questionable for many businesses, many small business owners are taking work where they can, even if it means sacrificing themselves.
Why it’s important for you to be in charge over your business
This may seem like an obvious topic to cover, but as so many small businesses can find themselves losing the power battle against their business, we want to remind all the small business owners out there why you need to be in charge.
1 – Stress and your health
While not being an enjoyable feeling, stress also causes many serious health problems.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health:
“Over time, continued strain on your body from stress may contribute to serious health problems, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other illnesses, including mental disorders such as depression or anxiety.”
2 – Productivity
On the other side of the coin, if you manage to reduce stress, not only will you reduce these possible health issues, you’ll also increase your relaxation time, leading to more productive work.
3 – Your business goals
If your time and attention is being taken up with administrative tasks that aren’t helping you reach your full potential, your goals aren’t being met.
This is likely to have detrimental impacts on your sales, profits and possibly the survival of your business.
4 – The quality of your work
If you’re not on top of your work, you might begin increasing the quantity while forgetting the quality.
Delivering multiple badly-delivered projects to clients is going to result in a loss of clientele, which not only reduces sales if clients don’t return, but can also damage your reputation and make it hard for you to gain new clients in the future.
How to take back control of your business
If you’ve read the above points and they seem relevant to you, you may be in need of taking back control of your business. Here’s how we recommend doing it.
1 – Remember why you started, remember your passion!
You started your own business because you had an innovative service or product idea that can benefit a specific audience. Take yourself back to why you started your business and remember your “Why”.
The way we recommend doing this is to ask yourself a few key questions:
- What’s the pain that you saw in your clients that your product or service solves?
- What type of clients do you love to help and why them?
- How are you uniquely placed to take that pain away?
By doing this, you can reignite the overriding passion that drives you in whatever you do, which is ultimately channelled into your business. This will help you feel more in control of your business by falling in love with it again!
2 – Analyse your initial aims and objectives; are they the same or have they changed?
It’s okay if your aims are the same as when you started out, but sometimes you might find that these have changed over time. If so, make sure to adapt them accordingly so you know what you’re working towards.
These first two points are all about creating a focus that’s realigned to what’s really important, and it ensures that your goals are relevant.
3 – Focus on creating value, not just putting in the time
Forbes sums this up perfectly in one sentence:
“Instead of just working more hours answering emails, responding to texts or taking care of low-value, third-party requests that seem to clutter up your days, learn to invest your best hours for creating maximal impact.”
What you want to make sure of is that you’re creating quality over quantity.
4 – Ask for help
Success is often not a solo sport. If you think that you’ve let your business start to take charge of you, reaching out for help can be a great way to take back control.
Contact us
Do you feel like the challenges of running your own business has caused it to overpower you? If so, don’t worry. It’s an easy thing to happen, but more importantly, it’s also fixable.
Our business advisers can help by:
- Realigning your focus
- Reigniting your business passion
- Assisting you to let go of some of the stress you’re facing
- Ensuring that you’re happy and having fun in running your business.
Interested in how we can help?
Contact us today.