The A to Z challenge and writing about woman entrepreneurs. You may read the previous posts here.
B is for Business Plan
Q is for Quit
Your business is your baby, and you will guard it fiercely. This is natural, but at times can be counter-productive. When you become too attached to trying to make it a success, you may work in a manner that hurts rather than helps you. Just like there is a time to get going and follow up on your work, there also comes a time when you may need to take a step back. To take a careful inventory of what processes are working, and what are not.
If there is a goal that you had set some time ago, and you are flogging yourself to meet it, you may like to consider if it's still as important to you. For instance, it may have been important to connect with ten new potential clients each week when you had just started out. However, it's been six months now and you are fairly well established. Does it still make sense to keep seeking out ten new contacts each week?
It's a matter of figuring out if you want to simply reinvest your energy in existing clients who have already bought from you, or you want to keep expanding your customer base. What's interesting is that there are no right or wrong answers. Both options work well at different times for an entrepreneur. The idea is to pick the one which is the best fit for you and your business at the current time.
Should you want to consolidate the business, and spend more time on product or service development for a while, it's perfectly okay to quit the goal of contacting ten new people each week. Quitting intelligently saves you energy, time, resources and even gives you a better direction. You release that low grade anxiety in the pit of your stomach which builds when you fail to meet the goal. Replacing it with an excitement to work on an aspect of your business that you may not have focussed on recently.
The Exercise
What You Will Need: A pen and paper and some time to go through the checklist to formulate what you need to really continue doing.
As you have been running your business, there has to be a set of rules that you have been following. Maybe they are not formally written down, but they exist in your head. These are usually loosely based off the goals that you have for your business. Now is a good time to write these down. Even if they seem inconsequential and trivial, please make a note of all the actions that you expect yourself to take in the course of a day, week, or month.
Now that you have your list of goals and actions, take a moment to chek if they are aligned with what you are trying to achieve in the current time and space for your business. Here are some questions that you can ask yourself. Please be honest as you answer for each item on your list to truly understand that sometimes quitting is more productive.
- Do you feel like doing the task?
- Is the task important to the health of your business?
- Do you need to do the task?
- Is it something that you enjoy doing?
- Is it helpful to you personally in any way?
- How difficult is it to achieve?
- Does it work, or do you need to keep trying out new angles to get it to work?
- Does it affect your well being physically?
- Is it making you more stressed out and anxious?
- Does your energy get drained when you do it?
Once you simply answer these questions you will know if you need to quit doing these actions. Should you find that you need to continue doing the actions, but they have a higher toll on your own physical or mental health, you may consider quitting doing them personally.
It may be easier for you to get someone else to do them for you. Hiring an assistant is often something women entrepreneurs are hesitant to do. While financial implications of hiring a person do intrude, you need to consider the cost to your personal wellbeing as well.
It's tough to do everything on your own. Imagine if one person tried to do everything in a multinational company? So if you need to quit being the cleaner to free up time to being the creative director, make it easy on yourself. Quit what doesn't need your direct involvement to redistribute your time better amongst the remaining tasks.
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