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 relationship you have with your small business requires constant effort and maintenance. Here are our top tips for helping you fall in love with your small business all over again…
Falling in Love with your Small Business
Reflect on your Business Journey
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 feel 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 that may help you fall in love with your business again is to take a trip down memory lane. Reflect on where your business started, the milestones you’ve achieved along the way that have led you to where you are now.
This reflection can serve as a reminder of why you started your small business in the first place, acting as motivation to help you push through this difficult patch. If it helps, make a physical list of your achievements over the last few years – doing so could 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, goals and targets to help keep you feeling inspired and motivated to push your business to the next level.
Take some time to look over your objectives and your mission and consider ways to expand them. It may be something as simple as working towards creating a community on social media or starting to send out a monthly newsletter to build customer rapport.
Or, it could be to do with 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 per week. This not only gives you something to work towards, but also benefits your business as a whole in the long run.
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 for your small business.
Nurture your Finances
According to research, one of the biggest challenges small business owners face that can cause them to fall out of love with their business altogether is financial issues. This 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 and may leave you feeling frustrated and disheartened.
If this is the case for you, taking some time out to focus on realigning your finances can help you fall in love with your business again.
Have a look over your accounts, either with your team or an external professional, and work out where things went wrong, and how they can be improved. Once improvements have been made, set goals that will ensure the same issue won’t reoccur.
Once you’ve done this, you’ll feel as if a weight has been lifted. You’ll begin to feel motivated once more to keep pushing your business to the next level, and that spark of joy your business used to bring you will be reignited.
Get Creative
Sometimes you and your small business can reach a bit of a stalemate. You’ve done what you needed to do, achieved your goals. Your business is performing well and doing what it should. That’s great, but what now?
Now is the perfect time to get your creative cap on. You’ve spent years grafting away, trying to get your business off the ground, and now it’s time for the fun stuff. Use this positive lull as an opportunity to get creative with your business. Rejuvenate your social media channels with some new content and make a point of engaging. Create an online course to benefit your audience or spend some time creating an e-book sharing your expertise.
Whatever it is, letting your creative juices flow and expanding your business in this way should leave you feeling excited and inspired once more, reigniting your passion for your small business and helping you to fall in love with it all over again.
Seek Inspiration
You may feel that you occasionally grow bored of your business. It consumes a large part of your life, which can feel overwhelming at times. This feeling of overwhelm may lead you to look to other sources of intrigue and interest – something to get your brain working again.
Instead of starting a new hobby that will only last a week or reading a book you’re not really interested in, seek inspiration for your current business.
Look at what others in your industry are doing. Read articles, study blogs, check out social media platforms and take inspiration from others. Applying this to your own business should leave you feeling motivated to push your business to the next level, quelling the boredom that had started to form.
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.
By clearing your mental plate, even slightly, you’ll be working towards restoring your work-life balance, which may help reduce the feeling of burnout you’ve been struggling with.
To help delegate responsibilities, make a list of tasks that need to be completed by you specifically, and those that don’t. For those that don’t, source professional support from someone skilled in that specific area. For example, if you could delegate your content creation to someone else, find a Virtual Assistant who specialises in it to give you a helping hand. Similarly, if it’s inbox management you could use some support for, get in touch with an admin expert.
Delegating tasks can feel daunting, especially if you’ve been running the show solo for a while. But falling in love with your business again is way more important than doing it all yourself. Let your guard down and delegate tasks to help reignite the love you once held for your small business.
Small Business Support with The Edwards Company
Here at The Edwards Company, we’re on hand to help you and your small business work through your relationship struggles. Whether it’s fixing your finances, stepping in to take creative tasks like content creation off your hands or working some admin magic to 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.