How to Stop Your Business From Keeping You Up At Night Part 2
December 22, 2021 - 9 minutes read
You’ve worked through many ways to reduce your business stress in Part 1 of this series (read it here), but we want to dive deeper into stress management by taking actionable steps today. We’re confident that you’ll be well on your way to life as a happier business owner once you work through these next steps.
If you want to learn how to handle business stress, you must start with a plan. We covered four great points in the first part of this series, but we want to cover some additional points.
How to Handle Business Stress – Planning for the Future
5. Working Towards Your Vision With a 1-, 3- and 5-Year Plan
Direction is key to your success, and it can also help relieve stress. You need to have clearly defined goals that you can work towards. Often, owners will get lost in the world of profits and not realize that lower profits this year may be a necessary part of their 3- or 5-year plan.
For example, in his 2006 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos said that you need to “nurture your seedlings.”
Seedlings are often unprofitable or bring in minor profits initially, but they can grow into major contributors to your business over the long term. These seedlings are often part of your long-term vision and plan.
Sit down and review or create a plan that includes:
- 1-, 3- and 5-year goals
- Short-term goals
- Objectives to meet your goals
Your long-term goal may be to transform your business into an industry leader in self-driving vehicles. However, you’re not going to reach this goal in a year. Instead, your vision needs to be supported with the yearly plans that you have and the goals you set for each year.
When you have a vision and a plan to reach your goals, you’ll find that you have less business stress and more motivation.
6. Review and Revise Your Pricing Strategy
Profit margins change over time. Every business owner pays close attention to shipping delays, shortages, and rising prices. Inflation is up to a 39-year high, so it’s putting a lot of stress on business owners.
If there was ever a time to review your pricing strategy, it’s now.
You should do the following:
- Adjust your prices to keep up with inflation. If you’re spending more to create the same products or perform the same service, your pricing needs to be adjusted.
- Review your profit margins. Perhaps you aimed to make 20% profit margins when you started your business, but you’re now making 12%. Can you increase your pricing? Will market appetite still exist with higher prices?
- Sit down with an accountant to look into your financial statements. Your business may still have healthy profits and cash flow, and regular reviews of financials can help you sleep better at night.
If you can’t increase your prices due to market demand or competitors, try and find upsells that you can offer to boost your overall profits.
7. Add Support and Accountability to Your Business
Thus far, you’ve done a fantastic job at reducing your business stress. However, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to add support and accountability to your business. Imagine, just for a second, that Jeff Bezos continued to run Amazon (while he was still CEO) all on his own.
No supervisors, vice presidents, team leaders or anyone that he could delegate tasks to in his business.
Amazon wouldn’t be the company it is today if he didn’t have support. Your business may not be the next Amazon, but you still need support. There are two main times when support will reduce stress and help you build a stronger business:
- When Times are Hard, You Need Support
Murphy’s Law is such that the law of nature will kick in, and whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. If you’re lucky, you won’t have many hard times, and everything will go as planned. However, don’t plan for this kind of luck because it’s fleeting.
Support can help you overcome these difficulties.
For example, a business mentor or financial professional can help you take actionable steps to get through these hardships as a stronger business.
Also, we highly recommend creating a what-if analysis for major business decisions, such as:
- Introducing new products
- Hiring new employees
- Removing products or services
- Rebranding
- Etc.
- When Times are Good, You Need Support
Ironically, there will (hopefully!) be times of significant growth in your business. Perhaps your new product or service has been so well-received that your profits are up 100% and you have more cash flow than you know what to do with.
For many owners, the above scenario is a dream come true.
However, if you have no idea what steps to take next, being too successful can be a major stressor. Working with someone to provide support may help you use these times of great growth and profits to reach your goals faster and help continue your sucess.
Finally, and this is something we’ve written extensively about before, you need to work with outside experts. These experts don’t have an emotional attachment to your business and can often shed new light on the health of your business.
A few of the many experts that you need to consider working with are:
- Accountants and/or bookkeepers
- Bankers
- Lawyers
- Financial advisors
- Insurance agents
- Marketing professionals
Of course, this is a general list that can be greatly expanded upon to meet your industry and niche. As an example, let’s assume that you found you’re missing a major opportunity in your niche. So, you’re introducing a new product to the market that has such great potential.
If you have great ideas but are not so great at product launches, you can work with an expert who will strengthen your launch and help make it a success.
Running a business isn’t easy. In fact, 45% of entrepreneurs state that they’re stressed. As an owner, it’s common to deal with business stress. However, once you learn how to cope with these stressors and overcome them, you’ll be able to continue growing your entity through good and bad times.
Over time, you’ll need to revisit the tips in this series to continue dealing with business stress.
We love helping people creating profitable companies people love. Ready for yours to be our next success story?