Up and down like a yo-yo, a day in the life of a business owner

Some people ask me, “What’s it like owning a business? It must be great,” and a lot of the time it is. My particularly fantastic days are when the members of the team achieve beyond their own expectations and they overcome a challenge and triumph. They are my greatest days.

Great days are when you win a new piece of business that you fought hard for and you know you’re right for. Great days are when people are happy and there’s great energy in the office, there’s money in the bank and there’s the will to keep growing and expanding and developing. Great days are when a client sends an email and says, “Felicity, we’re so thrilled with the work that the team has done. We couldn’t be happier. You’ve really made an impact to our company.” Great, great days.

Then there’s the low days: When you have to send the fourth, the fifth, the sixth email to a client to pay their bill.  A company that you’ve been busting your gut for, for a very long time, suddenly cuts you off.  Your team members have a tiff.  A staff member doesn’t work out. Your day’s diary looks like a Tetris game gone wrong. Tough days!

Tough days are when you need to make hard decisions.  Tough days are dealing with people’s absence. The toughest days are saying goodbye to staff members whom you’ve worked side by side with for years, then they decide to take another tack.

One of the things I’ve learned from ten years of being in business is that the highs are really high. Being self-employed often means having a feeling of success. It means experiencing pride in people and their work, and having the confidence to deliver amazing results for clients and their businesses, and really making a positive impact on other’s lives.

The lows, though, are so low! These are the days when you think, “I’m not sure that I can keep going,” or, “What’s the point?” Days when you’ve lost money, or people are upset, or something just hasn’t gone to plan.

The weird thing about running a business is that sometimes you’ll have that peak of the highest high and the lowest of the low on the same day – in the same hour. When I look back over ten years, that’s happened many, many times; Zadro’s won an award at 9:00am and something’s happened to a project at 9:35am. On a Friday morning someone rings you and says, “You’ve got the tender, you’re our chosen agency, we think you’re awesome,” and then at 1:00pm one of your superstars on the team resigns. The ups and downs are harsh and they often blind-side you.

You have to get used to it, however the thing that helps is knowing what the big picture is; this allows you to determine what is an up or a down. The only way to truly do that is to see things in a greater light, to zoom out, to see the big picture, to have a focused strategic plan because it enables you to ride those waves. Sometimes the highs can be instantly smashed by something else, and it’s really important that you stop and get to celebrate the good things. And then, when things don’t go to plan, keep realistic about what they mean, and how you can reframe them and bring them into line with the strategy.

This has been key and has helped me manage my emotions and my emotional energy over the past ten years.

I would say to anybody that if you’re thinking of starting a business, you’ll hear that you have to work hard and smart, be financially savvy, commercially minded and constantly deliver great work and manage a positive team culture. However, for me, the thing that you don’t hear, is the one thing I feel you ought to, and that is, leadership and entrepreneurship is also about maintaining an emotional baseplate in which your staff and your clients can come back to. You’ll need to learn how to use both the highs and lows to your advantage.

In business, there’s no two days the same, in fact, there’s no two hours the same. The true test of whether a business will survive, is the emotional capacity of its managers and its leaders. Can we cope with the ups and downs of life? And, what are we going to do to protect ourselves, to ensure that we have enough gas in our tank to ride those ups and downs?

For all the procedures and scalability that we build into businesses, and all the visibility, automation, tools, dashboards, and analytics, we’re still people going up and down. That takes a toll. When you are thinking about going into business, think about how you’ll manage that and how you’ll recharge your tank. For the emotional energy of the leaders is key to smoothing out those bumps.

Can you relate to the ups and downs of business ownership? Contact Zadro to develop a tailored strategic communications plan to keep you focused and the business on track. Visit www.zadroagency.com.au to find out more.