If you listen to the advice of many successful entrepreneurs, particularly those from Silicon Valley, it appears that the only way to succeed in business is to work non-stop and to sacrifice other aspects of your life. But while this may help a tiny minority to become billionaires, for most people it presents a serious, and totally unnecessary, risk of burnout. Sustainable business growth is possible without sacrificing your mental health. Here’s how you can do it.
Define Your Endgame
A good place to start, which many budding entrepreneurs overlook, is to define what success looks like to you. Most people do not really want their businesses to grow to the stratospheric size that many famous entrepreneurs have achieved, yet they are putting in the same long hours. Figure out what level of income from your business will allow you to live your desired lifestyle, then you can create attainable short-term growth targets to help you get there.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
Every business involves a mixture of core tasks, like choosing or designing new products, and repetitive routine tasks like invoicing. The latter can be a significant drain on your time and energy as a small business owner, and it can be unnecessarily expensive to hire someone to handle them. The optimal solution is to automate them. This can save you time, reduce your workload, cut down on errors, and give you the option to scale your business more quickly.
Make Use of Outsourced Expertise
It is probably no surprise to learn that financial stress is one of the leading contributors to burnout in entrepreneurs and business people. Managing business finances well becomes increasingly important as businesses grow, and it requires expertise in a number of complex areas, like accounting, tax planning, and asset valuation. However, most business people’s expertise lies in their products. Professional CFOs who possess this expertise command high salaries that are often beyond the means of small businesses.
However, there is a third way. An outsourced virtual CFO, or vCFO, can provide expert financial management at a fraction of the cost. This is possible because they work on an as-needed or part-time basis for your business, and they typically do this for several businesses rather than being exclusive to one.
Empower Your Team
Less complicated tasks than finance can be delegated to your team to reduce your workload. Delegation allows you to focus your energy on only your strongest tasks and the ones which have the most overall impact on the business. However, it is important to avoid micromanaging, which can actually be counterproductive. Demonstrating to your team that you trust them has actually been shown to improve the results of delegation and encourages your team to use their initiative to solve problems.
Focus on Quality Over Quantity
Doing more may make you feel productive, but this feeling can be misleading. Rather than putting your business on a path to growth, it may be putting you on a path to burnout. Business growth is not measured by how many activities a business does. It is measured by how much income it generates. However, in our minds it is all too easy to conflate the amount of work we are doing with our success.
Develop Scalable Systems
By outsourcing, delegating, automating, and trimming unnecessary tasks, what you are really doing is creating scalable systems. This means that instead of figuring out how to do new tasks as and when they arise, you already have a process in place that dictates who will handle it and then communicates that to the right person. “Scalable” just means that once it is in place, it continues to work even as the number of customers and clients grows.
Build Strong Boundaries
Rest and recovery matters in business as much as it does in exercise. Our brains, like our bodies, need downtime. That means fully switching off, not coping. Many burned-out business owners had their minds on the job 24/7 and failed to separate their work and personal lives. It is important to remember that you make up for the time you spend resting by being more productive during working hours, so your business can still grow unimpeded.
Conclusion
There is lots of low-cost assistance available to help you grow your business, from outsourced executives to automation software. With these tips and a clear end goal, you can grow your business sustainably and without impacting your mental health.
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