Contractors: How to Avoid Mid-Year EXHAUSTION!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. Today we're going to be talking about burnout as a small business owner and what you can do to avoid becoming exhausted. As we head into the second half of 2020, and as small business owners, there's a lot of stuff going on. What can you do to make sure that you can continue to stay strong for you, your business, your family and your team? Before we get to this show though, a big thank you to this sponsor, which is Gusto. If you haven't already gone, go to gusto.combootcamp. you can try out their software completely free for 90 days. And Gusto is going to be able to do all the federal, state and local taxes for your employees on their payroll, do direct deposits directly into their bank account, take care of all the numbers for you. So the end of the year you can give a W to. I highly recommend it. Check it out Today, go to gusto.combootcamp alright, so first of all, if you're listening to this and you're not a business owner, it might seem like why in the world would you be burning out right now? We're in the middle of summer, everything's fantastic, et cetera. Let me give you four reasons why there's a really good chance that this time of year, as we head in the end of August, September, that you can become feeling very exhausted and burnt out on your business and your life in general. Number one, we just happen to have gone through this pandemic for the past six months. Six months. And for a lot of us, we're just sick and tired of it. We're sick and tired of dealing with all the restrictions. We're sick and tired of the health concerns and the fear and just always trying to modify what we would regularly do in our regular life. And that can be really wearing on us. And that's not really just for business owners only, but especially if your business has been affected by state or federal mandates in terms of social distancing, you've been shut down, you're still shut down. You're dramatically impacted your business because of all of this and the health concerns. And you're just like, just ready for this to be over. It's been six months of just chaos. You can't go certain places to de stress, you can't communicate your friends in person and socialize as much as you would like to. And you're just ready for it to be over. And that's just kind of been like this, we're worn out. We're worn out with all of the restrictions and all the stuff that's been going on. I'm not saying that we should stop. I'm just saying that it does wear down on us. This summer has not necessarily been the, the best summer for most people with all of the restrictions and things that have been going on. The other reason is that we're two thirds of the way through the year. And that means that we've gone through now eight, nine months of just a lot of work, gone through all this pandemic stuff and restrictions and all the rest of it. But it's just been a long year. 2020 has not been the best year for most business owners on so many different fronts. And so we're 2/3 of the way through and we're 66, 70% of the way through this year. It can start to become a drag the day to day, figuring things out, kind of stuck in the rut. And that's just another reason why some people are leading to burnout. Another thing is financial pressure. The third thing is financial pressure can lead to burnout. And that might mean that you're not taking enough money home. You feel like you're really been stretched thin. Maybe the pandemic didn't make you close, maybe that there has been restrictions placed on you and your revenues have been cut in half. Maybe you had to let people go. Maybe now you don't have the same team members that you had before and you're finding it challenging to get people back to working at your business. And that leads me to my fourth thing that is people problems. People problems. People that you hire, your managers, your team, your employees, just a lot of issues and drama. And with this whole pandemic, maybe like I said, you haven't been able to get them to come back to work because they're afraid, or worse yet, they were making more money on unemployment and didn't want to come back to work. And so these are things that really begin to wear on a business owner, begin to wear on us emotionally and physically. And just it's very, very difficult sometimes to put it into words unless you've been in the scenario of being a business owner. The amount of pressure that kind of comes on you. And especially this time of year, I see it very, very often, especially for entrepreneurs and for businesses that require seasonal work in the summer. And so not only is it a mental game, it's like a physically, you're working out in the heat and it's just day in and day out and you're grinding your body down, it seems like. And so it can be very, very difficult to manage the financial pressure, all of the pressure that's going on with the pandemic, all of the pressure that goes on with financially trying to just provide for your family, et cetera, and then also dealing with all the people and their issues and all the people you hire and they're not feeling good and they're having relationship issues and then they're having car, all these different things that come up. And it can be very, very straining mentally on a small business owner. And so today I wanna talk about a few different things that I would suggest. And I'm not the master on this sort of thing. Do I get burnt out?

Not really. Like most people would. I do get definitely periods of time where I just do not feel as motivated or I do not feel like a gung ho or after it as much. And usually those times are usually a couple hours. I don't usually have stints of months or years where it's just like I'm in this of being overwhelmed and just burnt out. I don't usually have that. Usually I kind of click back to one of these things I'm about to mention and it kind of helps me get through that sort of period of being burnt out. And for me, a lot of times, honestly, something I didn't write down here, I just need to sleep. Honestly, if you don't, if you have a really demanding schedule sometimes just like realizing and being self aware, like, okay, I am like sleep deprived and I need to go sleep. That's something you need to do before you even start doing what I'm about to talk about. Like for me, if I start getting cold sores inside of my mouth, I know immediately that like I'm either really stressed or I have to sleep. And I've never, I don't think I've ever shared that. But like just trying to be vulnerable and realizing that like your physical body begins to react to the stress that you put on it. And so if I have not been sleeping enough or I'm really stressed out, usually I'll get a cold sore. And a lot of times when I get one cold sore, I'll kind of be like, come on, it's not that bad. Like I've been sleeping decently or like, I'm not super stressed. Like it's been pretty good, but I can't kid my body. Like my body like the expression the ball never lies in sports. Well, for me it's like the cold sore never lies. I either haven't been sleeping enough or I've been too stressed out. And so I've been, I've been trying to be getting better about like, if I do get a cold sore, happens every couple months, every few months, just being like, okay, regardless of how much I have on my plate, regardless of who needs help or who is asking for my time, I have to lock down and carve out time to sleep and just kind of recuperate for a day to like literally a couple days and I'll be fine. It just, I have to buckle down and do it. But here are a few things that I would traditionally snap to in more of a daily or weekly scenario where I do feel stressed or burnt out. These are some of the things that I kind of default to. Probably different for other people, but hopefully a different strategy that you might not have kind of thought about before that might help you. So first thing is create boundaries. And this is a tough one because most of us are type A, we want to get stuff done. We just are. We don't mind working all night long to get stuff done. But if you, especially if you have a family, especially if a significant other that wants to spend time with you, you have kids, et cetera, you've got to create boundaries. And so you don't create burnout for you and your family. So like, for example, it might mean, okay, when I get home from work, I get one hour worth of time to like catch up on book work, for example, or I'm on my computer and then after that I can't touch it anymore. Or maybe it's just that when you get home, there's no more work going on at home. Or maybe there's a time, for example, everything after 8pm is no more work. Creating really strict boundaries. That's one way to do it. I'm leaving work at 7pm no matter what, no matter if it's gonna flow in tomorrow, no matter if there's people's schedules done, no matter if so and so asked me to do something and I wasn't able to get to it, it has to stop at seven and I'm going home. Those are boundaries that I would recommend. That way you do not work till 10, 11, 12 o' clock, and then you make your spouse mad and they're unhappy with you. Then you go home and there's tension. So, like, creating boundaries is a really good thing. Number two is from a financial standpoint, especially the reason we do a lot of those, we don't respect those boundaries of time. We work way long is a lot of times it comes down to financial pressure. And so the second thing is from a financial standpoint is raise your prices and reduce growth. And that might seem like the most horrible thing to you, but if you're growing really fast and you have thin margins, maybe to reduce your stress, that financial pressure that you're having is raise your prices. Therefore it's going to reduce your growth, which growth alone creates a lot of strain and stress and pressure. Because you're hiring, you have to buy new things, all the rest of it, lots of things are breaking and you're trying to fix them and create new systems. And if you can just slow down your growth by simply raising your prices, having a higher margin now, that financial pressure doesn't seem so bad either because you have the extra margin and in your pocket. The third thing is really simply do a midday break. This doesn't work for everyone. I'm not like a huge proponent of this, but I've done it occasionally. Like a 10 minute break. I was like, I'm detached from what I'm doing and just go someplace. Literally, it could be like 30ft away and just be in a different space. So if I've been sitting at my computer till like 2:00am and I'm like, I just need some time, I might literally just go walk around the plaza like where the office is at. Or like just like two minutes, three minutes just to kind of break off whatever negative thought I was thinking about or like weird spot I had slipped into mentally. Like just like, hey, I'm out of here for a second. Maybe you're at the office. You just walk around the office. Maybe it's you step outside. I like being outside. Like the fresh air, it really helps. So again, a midday break, five minutes, two minutes. Like it doesn't need to be long. You don't need like, oh, I need an hour break to go sit and meditate. Like that might be good for you. But like most, most business owners, we're all like, so you know, we have busy schedules and like we can't do that necessarily and other people are depending on us. So the two five, six minute breaks that you can get throughout the day, those are really awesome. Just kind of detach from what you're doing. If you're driving, like, if you're driving all over the place, instead of staying on the regular route that you always go, go a different route. Literally pull over the side of the street and just get outside. Just sit on the Tailgate of your truck or roll down the windows, open up your sunroof. These are things that are really simple, they don't cost money and they're trying to get you out of the same kind of the rut. Like again, like a big thing for me is like if I always drive the same like way to get to certain places, go a slightly different way, stop. Two minutes is all you need, a little break. I don't use that one a whole lot, but sometimes it helps. Especially if you can really physically feel like your cortisol, like just really pumping. It's the stress hormone. And like you can really feel stress. You just need to kind of detach from your day to day real quick. Something like that might help. Another thing is a two day vacation might be what you need in nature. And so I'm not a huge fan of like long, long vacations. I get kind of bored. But like, and for most of us as business owners, we can't afford to spend that time away from our team. If we're trying to grow and grow and build, if we're trying to build the business right, it's different if you're in a different stage of the business where you are more or less the systems are running and the people are running. But if you're trying to grow a business, it's hard to do it remotely from for two weeks when you're trying to hire people and all the rest of it, right? And so maybe just do a two day weekend vacation. It doesn't have to be like on the other side of the country. It could be like two hours away. Maybe go tenting or rent an RV for two days. Something that doesn't take a whole lot of time to prep and unpack and all the rest of it. Something like that might be all you need to kind of just unplug. And the big thing is the reason that's so important, whether it be the two minutes midday break or the two day vacation that you take on the weekend to like a more secluded area. Don't be around people and stresses and like stuff going on. Get away from all that. Get away from where it's quiet down next to a river in the mountains, away from cell service. Maybe you're like mean, like you don't really like getting away from Internet just in case someone needs you. And so like you'd rather be in somewhere that's a little more civilized but like get away from people and the hustle and the bustle and street lights and all the rest of it. Just get away somewhere where you can just relax, meditate, focus on the future, think about. And this is the thing, as a small business owner, especially as you grow, it's important that you get out of that mindset of just grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. Because you don't like lift your head up long enough even for a split second to realize that there might be other avenues that you could go. Like if you're just grinding all the time, like head down, go, go, go, go. You might realize that after like a while, you're way down the road when you should have been taking like a different detour, like a different turn back beforehand and you've missed out an opportunity or you've missed out on some way you could have improved the business because you just been like, oh, I'm doing, I'm grinding, I'm grinding, I'm going, I'm going. And a lot of us find a lot of pride in grinding and that's not a bad thing. I think grinding is awesome. But when you just keep your head down, you're just doing it and you're doing it and you're doing it. Sometimes that two day vacation or that two minute break in the middle of the day is enough for you to be like, okay, let me just step back, look around, my head's not down grinding anymore. And like, where's the opportunity? What can I change? What can I improve in the business? And you see some great opportunity or way that you can change the business when you step away and kind of detach from the minutiae, the day to day grind of what you're doing. Not to take away from the grind. Very important, we should do it most of the time. But you gotta make sure once in a while, especially as the owner, you step back and ask yourself, like, are we on the right course? Like if we keep grinding, are we going the right direction? Because maybe we've veered off a little bit. We need to kind of corre the course. That's something that can be very helpful and be very possible on a two day vacation or a break. Last thing is making sure that you exercise your exercise physically and spiritually every day. I'm a huge proponent of this, you know, physically being able to exercise, get stressed out. Like if you look at the hormonal aspects of the body. And a lot of this I think of like, it sounds stupid, but I think about charts and things that I saw when I was doing pre medicine and doing anatomy and physiology and kinesiology and things like that when I was Studying that, I think a lot about those. When I am stressed or when I am observing another person, I'm thinking about the hormonal levels. It changes. We are governed a lot of us by hormones. And so if I'm really, really stressed, just being able to take it from a scientific standpoint, look, right now my cortisone, I can feel it pumping through my body and that my heart rate is higher, that everything's, you know, how it's operating, my body is because of the stress hormone. What can I do to reduce that? What can I do that to eliminate that from my being secreted from my body? Like, I need to relax here. And a lot of times for me, like physical exercise really helps because it gets the cortisol pumping when you're physically exercising and you're punching a punching bag or running or whatever it might be. And so that your cortisol is not pumping when you're in a meeting and that or when you're trying to interact with your family because you've got it out, you've got it secreted out and you're like done with it. And so.

Exercise for me, really, really important as well as spiritually the opposite. Instead of the cortisol pumping out, it's like, let's meditate, relax de stress. And so those are two things that have really helped me. And so hopefully something that was said today that kind of just give you an idea or maybe something you want to try next time you feel stressed. I feel like something that's very, very important to be self aware, know when you're triggered and know when like, okay, I'm feeling really, really stressed and so that I don't break and so that I don't for me like get cold sores and really break down. In order for that not to happen, I need to change my behavior right now. And that might be sleeping, that might be taking a break, that might be having some more physical exercise or meditation. It might be creating more boundaries around your timing, your schedule or having like a two minute break in the middle of the day. Or it might be from a financial standpoint, the pressure like instead of just going after like, oh, I gotta fix the exhaustion. Well, fix the root of the problem, which is the fact that your business is financially insecure and you need to raise your prices to create some more level of security. And that's gonna help with the anxiety and the issues that you feel in terms of being burnt out. So hopefully something was said that helpful. Thank you so much for watching or listening. I'M Mike Andes, listening to the Business Bootcamp podcast. Until next time, Be great. Nothing else. Pears.