Is Your Quality of Life Killing Your Business?
November 1, 2021 - 9 minutes read
Did you know that small business owners work double the amount of time a regular employee works? Most owners work over 50 hours per week, and some will work 80+ hours – the equivalent of working two full-time jobs.
When you’re trying to build quality in life and business, it can be difficult when your business takes up 50% or more of your time. In this post, we’re going to answer a few questions:
- What is quality of life?
- What is quality in business?
- How quality of life is linked to quality in business
What is Quality of Life?
Quality of life as a business owner is your own level of happiness and enjoyment. When you’re working 80 hours a week, never get time off and don’t have any free time, your quality of life will remain low.
Unfortunately, when your well-being suffers, your quality in business will also suffer.
While quality of life is highly subjective, most owners want to:
- Build a business that allows them to live the life they want
- Use their hard work to enjoy time outside of the business
- Create a workplace that employees love
If you have a high quality of life, you’ll make better business decisions and have the energy to grow your business.
Quality of life spills into quality in business.
What is Quality in Business?
Quality in business is more than just making a great product. When you focus on quality, you’re focusing on:
- Improving employee happiness
- Boosting customer satisfaction
- Creating products or services that exceed expectations
Since your business is a combination of moving parts, quality can mean a lot of things. For example, quality can mean providing the best products or services, exceeding the expectations of customers or truly filling a void in the market.
As a bonus, boosting your quality in business will also increase business value.
How Quality of Life and Quality in Business are Intrinsically Linked
When your quality of life is low, you’re overworked, and you’re unhappy and stressed, your business is likely to suffer. Traditionally, when you’re unhappy and don’t have the free time to enjoy life, it leads to:
- Poor products or services
- Struggling to reach business goals
- Unhappy or unsatisfied customers
- Unhappy employees
Prioritizing your quality of life will help your business grow.
4 Ways to Improve Quality of Business and Life
If you have a purpose and work to improve your quality of life, it will also improve your business quality. A few of the many ways that you can improve quality of life this year are:
1. Work With Experts to Delegate Tasks
Often, business owners will take on too many tasks. When an owner first opens their business, they’ll fall into the habit of doing everything. However, there’s only so long that you can work 80 – 100 hours a week before you burn out.
When your financials allow, you should start to work with experts.
Why?
When you delegate tasks to experts, you’re doing a few things:
- Recuperating lost hours so that you can spend less time in the office
- Improving your results because an expert can do the same job better
- Increasing your revenue
Ironically, a Gallup study shows that when a CEO is good at delegating tasks, business revenue is improved by 33%.
You can start by delegating tasks that aren’t a core part of your business operations. For example, if you’re not a marketing expert, offload marketing tasks to experts so that you can free up time and spend more time on other areas of your business.
2. Separate Business and Life When Possible
If your life is business, it can become exhausting. You need to find ways to separate your business life and personal life. When you go on vacation and have to handle ten phone calls a day and can’t rely on management to oversee operations, your quality of life will plummet.
Instead, find ways to have separate personal and business lives.
You can do this by:
- Systemizing your operations so that others can step into your shoes
- Outsourcing and delegating tasks to free up your time
- Creating “open” and “closed” hours and sticking to them
Often, that urgent email or phone call can wait. You need to put up barriers that allow you to maintain a high quality of life. Something as simple as enforcing strict operational hours can help you find sanity and happiness in your own life.
3. Work Hard and Stay Positive
Positivity will spill into your workforce. When you’re burned out or feel like your life revolves around work, it can be challenging to go into work and actually work hard. However, when you realign your mindset, you’ll be able to:
- Work harder and more optimally
- Maximize your work so that you don’t have to work as long
There will be times when you have to stay in the office longer or handle emergency calls. If you react to these issues swiftly and remain positive, you’ll reduce your stress, alleviate burnout and improve your quality of life and business.
4. Get Outside Help to “Step Back”
For many business owners, one of the hardest parts of running a company is stepping back from operations. If you feel like the entire business relies on you working daily and never missing a day, it’s time to step back.
Work with experts that can help you identify which tasks you can hand off to others and find ways to help you step back from operations.
In the ideal world, you’ll build a strong brand that empowers you to live the life you prefer without having to feel like the business will fail if you step back from operations. Experts can help you find ways to step back from your business so that when you are conducting business, it’s at the highest level possible.
Final Thoughts
Your business should help you meet your quality of life goals. When you’re stressed, unhappy and unproductive, it’s difficult to achieve quality in business. If you follow the advice above, you’ll move closer to finding the balance between quality of life and business that you deserve.
Of course, if you need any assistance, we can help.
When we work together to help you grow and optimize your business, part of that is looking at how to make sure your quality of life is matching up to what you want it be.
Not sure where to start?