Updated: 8/1/25
As Valentine’s Day approaches, you may find yourself with love on the brain. And it may not have anything to do with your romantic relationships, but rather the relationship with your small business.
No relationship is completely smooth sailing, and the relationship you have with your small business is no exception. While it started out with love and passion at its core, you may have begun to hit a few bumps in the road. Lack of motivation, overwhelm, boredom or financial struggles might be causing you to quickly fall out of love with your business, replacing feelings of passion and joy with those of frustration.
But all is not lost! Like any strong relationship, the one you have with your business requires constant effort and maintenance. Here are all our top tips designed to help you fall in love with your small business all over again…
Falling in Love with Your Small Business
Reflect on Your ‘Why’
When you’re so absorbed in the running of your business, it can be easy to get bogged down with the here and now, making things feel stressful and you a little stuck. This may be particularly prevalent if progress has been a little slow lately, causing you to feel frustrated with your business.
The best thing to do in this situation is to take a trip down memory lane. Reflect on why you started your business in the first place. Was it to indulge a passion of yours? To serve a community? To solve a problem for others that you’ve faced? Revisiting your ‘why’ can help you get back to the core of your business and leave you feeling motivated to fulfil that goal again.
While you’re perusing down memory lane, take the time to consider where your business started too, and everything you’ve achieved to get it where it is today. If it helps, make a physical list of your achievements over the last few years, big or small. Doing so can reignite that passion you once felt and may help you fall in love with your small business again.
Set New Dreams and Goals
Like all relationships, the one you share with your small business requires constant effort. That means setting new dreams and goals to help keep you feeling inspired and motivated to push through this tricky patch.
Take some time to look over your objectives and your mission and consider ways to expand or adapt them. It may be something as simple as working towards building a community on social media or starting to send out a monthly newsletter to build customer relationships. Or it could be a goal focused on something you’ve struggled with in the past. For example, if your admin tends to pile up, set yourself a goal of completing two hours of admin tasks per week. This not only gives you something small, short-term and tangible to work towards, but also tackles one of the problems that may be causing you to fall out of love with your business in the first place.
If you’ve been feeling a little disillusioned by your business lately or feel you need to reignite that relationship spark, take some time to set some new goals to work towards. This should leave you feeling excited for all that is to come.
Nurture Your Finances
Financial issues can be a big strain on your business, and on your relationship with it. A financial issue may be something as simple as a slow month for cash flow, or something a bit more challenging to resolve like built-up aged debt. Either way, it can put a real dampener on your business journey, leaving you feeling frustrated and disheartened.
If this is the case for you, taking some to focus on finances could be beneficial. Have a look over your accounts – either with experienced members of your team or an external professional – and work out where things could be improved. Are there processes that could be streamlined? Could you dedicate more time to credit control, either internally or through outsourcing? Making small improvements to your financial management can help things feel a lot less stressful.
Once things are looking more positive, you’ll feel as if a weight has been lifted. You’ll feel motivated once more to keep pushing your business to the next level, without the burden of ongoing financial issues hanging over you.
Get Creative
Sometimes, you and your business can reach a bit of a stalemate. You’ve done what you needed to do, achieved your big goals, your business is performing well and working as it should do. That’s great, but what now?
A plateau for your small business can leave things feeling a bit lacklustre, with motivation waning and your attention being pulled elsewhere. If that’s the case for you, now is the perfect time to put your creative thinking cap on. You’ve spent years grafting away, working to get your business off the ground, and now it’s time for the fun stuff. Use this lull as a positive opportunity to get as creative as possible with your business. Rejuvenate your social media channels with a content format you haven’t tried before. Create an online course to immerse your audience in your business, or spend some time writing an e-book to share your expertise.
As a small business owner, there are so many channels and platforms at your disposal to keep things interesting – play around with them, determine what works well for your business, and have fun with it. You never know, doing so might open up new doors of opportunity for your small business moving forward – a very exciting prospect!
Whatever you choose to do, letting your creative juices flow and expanding your business in new ways should leave you feeling inspired once more, reigniting your passion for your small business and helping you fall in love with it all over again.
Delegate and Share Responsibilities
If overwhelm or feelings of burnout have led you to fall out of love with your business, it may be time to share the load. Delegating some tasks to outsource professionals or sharing more responsibilities between team members can help free up some of your time, reduce stress and increase productivity.
BY clearing your mental plate, even slightly, you free up space for you to be able to focus on working on the parts of your business that you love the most. Not only will this help with work-life balance, but it can also remind you of why you fell in love with running this small business in the first place.
To delegate responsibilities effectively, make a list of tasks that need your direct attention, and those that don’t. For those that don’t, source professional support from someone skilled in that specific area. For example, if you struggle to find time for content creation or it simply isn’t your thing, find a Virtual Assistant who specialises in it to give you a helping hand. Or, if credit control is a consistent problem, consider outsourcing to a credit control expert.
While delegating tasks can feel daunting to being with, maintaining motivation and a desire to keep pushing and growing your business is way more important than doing it all yourself. You’ll find falling in love with your business again far easier when you’re sharing the load.
Small Business Support with The Edwards Company
Here at The Edwards Company, we specialise in helping small business owners manage their businesses effectively, and in a way that sparks joy, not dread! Whether it’s fixing your finances with professional credit control, stepping in to take creative content tasks of your hands or working some admin magic to help keep things running smoothly, we can help.
For support in falling in love with your small business again, please do not hesitate to get in touch.