Learning to LOVE Your Business Again - 6 Simple STEPS

Posted on April 17, 2018 by Megan Arneson, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.

Have you “fallen out of love” with your business?

Did you start your business because you loved the service you were providing or the product you were producing, but then you got overwhelmed by all the other things you had to do to make the business end of it all actually work?

Do you dread dealing with your accounting software, CRM, or contract employees? Do you procrastinate writing blog posts or drafting marketing emails?

Do you have a list of things you know you “should do” to protect yourself and your business that aren’t income-generating, but could become big problems if you don’t address them?

These are only a few of the many reasons so many small businesses fail.

We go into business to do what we love, to have the freedom to make our own decisions and our own schedules, and many of us end up slaves to the business itself and rarely finding time to focus on the parts of it that used to bring us joy!

So, how can you fall in love with your business all over again?

Here’s a list of suggestions to help you eliminate the overwhelm and get back to what you love:

1. Identify Your Purpose
Remind yourself why you got into this in the first place … How does your product or service make the world a better place? (Or, if you have trouble thinking that big, what problem does it alleviate for your ideal customer?) What do/did you love about what you do?

2. Set Some Goals
Long-term: 1, 3 and 5 year goals are a great place to start. Keep them simple in terms of a specific outcome, vision, or feeling you want to create!
Short-term: Quarterly milestones are easier to track and plan.

3. Make A Plan
A 90-day plan for attaining 1-3 short-term goals is a game changer! Work backward to figure out the steps you need to take to reach that goal and be sure to include the time you will commit to each step. My current favorite planning tool is the SELF Journal.

4. Assess and Record Your Processes and Daily Activities
My guess is you don’t have an inventory of all the stuff you do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis for your business.

If you take some time to start recording this, it’ll help you identify areas for streamlining, and areas that need more attention.

Once you’ve documented your processes, it’ll be so much easier to hand them over to someone else so that you can stop wasting time on the pieces that no longer bring you joy.

5. Outsource, Outsource, Outsource!
While you’re examining processes, take some time to make a couple of lists of different kinds of activities in your business:
- Those you absolutely LOVE doing
- Those you don’t love but are relatively decent at and don’t completely drain you
- Those you hate doing OR are lacking the skills/interest to get good at (for some people, this is accounting, for some it’s marketing – pick your poison)
- Then, outsource EVERYTHING in list 3!

Use a platform like Upwork, Outsourcely, Guru or Fiverr to take a lot of the time and risk out of hiring high-quality people to do short-term or long-term contract work so you can free up more time.

6. Wash, Rinse, Repeat!
I’d highly recommend revisiting this process at least once a year, and November is really a perfect time to review. As we come up to the close of this year, we can effectively plan ahead for what we want to see, feel or create next …

Now, all of these suggestions will require some extra time up front, but once they’ve been implemented, you’ll be amazed at how much time you gain on the other side! Time you could spend dreaming and planning for the future. Or, simply creating whatever you love to create, or spending the face-to-face time with clients that you’ve been missing so much. Investing this time up front creates space for you to reconnect with your why. And without it, you just keep spinning. Wouldn’t you rather love what you do again?

Creating new processes and efficiencies, streamlining, and getting help will turn things around so that your business is working for YOU. When you no longer feel trapped by it, but turn it into a productivity machine, I promise you can start to fall in love with it all over again.

The sky’s the limit! Remember that feeling? That’s why you started this thing in the first place, isn’t it?

_~

Questions? Challenges? I’d love to hear from you … what’s the part of running your own business that makes you the most happy? What about the least?