6 Ways to Dodge The Burnout Express

Today we’re talking about six ways that you can boost your business when you’re feeling overwhelmed. Now being overwhelmed is part of life. But it can be a sign that you’re boarding the burnout express when you are feeling overwhelmed daily. When you are feeling like you have nothing more to give you are exhausted.
Being overwhelmed daily starts affecting your personal life.

That’s when it leads to burnout

And that’s ultimately why my offerings exist. It’s something that I’m extremely passionate about removing burnout. Especially amongst females because ultimately they’re trying to do it all. And as many people do, we set up businesses, and don’t really think about how much work it takes to just have the business working.

We come from backgrounds where we have different departments for different things. We have our job role that our bosses tell us what we do. And when that goes, although we are amazing at our job. We are then faced with being the finance person. The HR person, admin person and being the marketing person. Being everything to everyone and then we have our personal life as well.

It’s no surprise that many people end up feeling completely overwhelmed

Which is why I wanted to give you six tips that you can put into place now to make sure that you set yourself up for reducing feeling overwhelmed, as much as you possibly can.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2yQg7gTTlqQ

1. Look at where you are in your business

Where is your business currently in comparison to your business vision? Make sure that you spend some time sitting down really working on your business vision. Making sure that you were looking at:

• Where you see your business going
• What your goals are
• Working out your milestones to get there

Are you on track to achieve your vision, or do you need some work? Maybe you need to send your business in a bit of a different direction to be able to achieve that vision. But making sure you’re looking at where you are currently in comparison to where you want to be is really really important.

2. Your metrics

So it’s looking at your current results and what you are currently doing. If you have clients currently, how did you get those clients, what has worked for you? And what works not only for getting the results but actually for you and your personal life as well. So if you have something that is working, and it’s generating clients and sales. But it’s a huge time suck, then looking at how you can avoid this being a huge time suck! What can you streamline from this process that isn’t going to sacrifice the results?

And then it’s just making sure that you are looking at the metrics of those. Sometimes what we end up doing is we get stuck in this wheel of okay well that strategy has worked really really well to get clients. And therefore we continue this strategy, and six months down the line that strategy is not working anymore.

That’s something that we need as business owners to be aware of. Is that trends change, strategies change, the way people like to take in information changes. We need to make sure that we are at the tip of that and we are changing direction and changing strategy. When we need to.

Now, don’t panic.

This doesn’t mean that you need to include a whole new strategy. It just means that the strategy that you’re currently using may need some tweaking. There might just be some little bits that you need to change in order to get that strategy working for you again.

But ultimately, where people then get tricked is they put a strategy in place they see it working. They don’t check their metrics, and then they are caught off guard when they see it’s reducing, they think what’s happening, what’s going on, why am I not getting the amount of clients that I usually get? And it’s because if you lack tracking those metrics, you aren’t then able to put yourself in the best position to change things around before you absolutely need to.

So, when you can see that your metrics aren’t growing anymore and they may be reducing or staying stagnant. Then you can look at it and think, Okay, well actually I need to do something here, because it’s not working as it used to. And by doing the metrics side of things, that enables you to be in the best place possible to be able to adapt before things become too late. Essentially, so you do not need to start again – none of us wants to be in that position!

3. Automations

As I’ve touched upon, looking at what’s working for you, and finding out a way that you can streamline is really important. But when you are streamlining sometimes there will be something that you’re doing as a strategy that’s working really well.

Even if you have streamlined as much as you possibly can without causing an issue with the results that you’re getting. You can still find that it’s such a huge time suck. That’s when you need to look at automation. Now, don’t panic. I know you’re probably thinking, if you don’t like tech that I haven’t got time to figure out automation.
Automation is as complex as we make it.

Now, it can just be small steps that just make a huge difference. For instance, if you’ve got an onboarding process and you have a Google form that someone fills out. But then you have your call booking software that you use, how about you combine the two together? Because most of the time the call booking software can also work as a form as well.

That’s where we’re looking at the automation piece but then enabling any integrations because it’s much simpler to use.

The third party integrations that are already done for you, through a particular piece of software. So for an example Calendly. Making sure that you have the integrations with say your Google Calendar, your zoom, Google meet etc. Making sure that you have those integrations turned on in Calendly. It is a case of just literally going into your Calendly settings and switching the button on and signing in. That’s as simple as we can make this automation side.
Once you’re more comfortable with it, you can start doing more. You can start doing some more automations. But especially when you’re starting out, start small and these small little steps will make a huge difference. Please just don’t write off automation because you don’t like tech, make a point of just doing these little tiny steps that are going to help you get to your end vision.

4. Processes reduces being overwhelmed

So, what’s actually working in your business, how do you carry out a particular strategy and what needs to be done? Making sure that we set these up as a workflow is really important because it gives you a bird’s eye view of how things feed into each other. So, when you create your workflow, you can then see how the process is feeding into each other. I’m 99% sure that you will see something in there that isn’t really working, and it’s something that we wouldn’t necessarily see when we’re just faced with a huge long list of processes!

Being able to see it as a bird’s eye view in a workflow situation is really, really important to make sure that you can then see the gaps. And once you then have that process set out of what this looks like. It means that you are then able to be consistent. And this reduces the procrastination around things. Because often being overwhelmed is accompanied by procrastination because we feel like we have too much going on. And then we sit down to do something, and we don’t know where to start. Who else has felt like that?

I know I have.

And by setting up these processes, knowing that the steps that you need to take are really really important to making sure that you are in the best possible place to see any gaps. To see anything that isn’t necessary and actually doesn’t bring any return and you don’t need to do.

5. Your system

This is something that many people overlook and your system is really really important because it reduces procrastination. It creates consistency across the board. And it means that ultimately you have stopped yourself being the bottleneck. So when you’re looking at creating your system, which is a mixture of your processes put together – so your strategy of what you’re doing. Which are built into one system and that creates a desired outcome. As an example here, if you had your content management system.

Part of that would be your content creation but you would also maybe have your content repurposing.
And that all forms part of your content management. Because ultimately your whole content goal will be your content management goal. So what are you trying to achieve from your content? Are you trying to become more visible? Or are you trying to get more sales? What is the objective? And once you then have that, the strategies that would be the processes inside. So if you have your content repurposing strategy, you would then have your processes within the content repurposing strategy.

You then have your content creation strategy then you would have your processes for how you carry that out.

So can you see how it all feeds together? And it means that you are then, enabling yourself to (even if you don’t have a team member at the moment), when you do hire a team member that you can easily hand this over. It’s something that you know works, you know it’s going to be done consistently, because you have a system there to do that. So when you hand it over to someone actually your audience isn’t going to know that someone else is doing it because it’s being done exactly the same way that it always has been.

This also means that when you track your metrics, you are able to generate accurate metrics.

So it’s not bitty in that you’re doing a particular process and then you may be doing something slightly different, the week after. Which then means the metrics that you get aren’t true metrics, Because you need to make sure that you are doing something exactly the same way with the rule of thumb is 90 days. So making sure that you are doing something exactly the same for 90 days means that the metrics that you then track, you are then able to see accurately, if they are working or not.

Whereas if you don’t have this in place and you track your metrics but, there’s always going to be something that’s just slightly different. Your metrics aren’t going to be as accurate as they could be. So, having a system in place because I know some people say, Well, I don’t have a team and I don’t want to team so I don’t need systems. But actually everyone needs systems. Because of this reason you want to make sure that what you are tracking accurately and what you are seeing in your business is true. The only way you can do that is if you have a system that’s telling you what you need to be doing.

6. Looking at your team

I know you might say, I don’t want a team. I’m happy with it just being me. And that’s perfectly fine. But if we want at some point, we’ll get to that level, in their business. Where they physically cannot do everything themselves. And they have maxed out the automation, they are then feeling….Okay actually I do need something, and even if that’s something is an admin person that’s going to help with just a couple of bits of admin. Or an accountant or whatever that may be, you need to make sure that you are looking in the long haul.

So, what do you want from your life?

I’m pretty sure you haven’t set up your business to work 24 hours a day. And ultimately that’s what will end up happening, if you create a business it’s just based around you and you only. You will also then cap your income. I also guarantee that you didn’t set up a business and have the additional stresses of business, just to earn exactly the same as what you could earn in a job.

Because ultimately that’s what you’re then doing if you set up your business to just form around you and you are the bottleneck. You are responsible for every single thing that happens. We all only have 24 hours in a day. You know, Beyonce doesn’t have any more hours, no one else has any more hours and 24 hours in a day. Ultimately as humans, we can only do so much, no matter how magical and amazing and superhero we are.

And we need to sleep, right, we need to sleep, we need to eat, we need to exercise, we need to do these other things that don’t involve business.

Ultimately those things that are not billable on things that we’re doing. So, how are you going to leverage your business to give you the revenue that you really crave, when you set up your business? That also complements the amount of time that you are putting into running your business.

So even if we are freelance, we still have to do our tax returns, we are still having to do our admin, we’re still having to do our invoicing, we are still having to do behind the scenes so many things that are not billable. And ultimately what you then end up doing is only working a tiny portion of the day that billable hours and the rest isn’t, and if you are not able to make up that time.

With all that price within your clients work, which most of us wouldn’t be able to, then we really need to be looking at a more sustainable business for you.

In my opinion, every single person will have to have some form of support at some point in their business journey.

And what you want to be doing is making sure that you have all the other steps that we’ve spoken about today. All of those set out in a way that you can clearly then see what role you actually need support with. Because you want to be super super clear on what that looks like for you. Especially when it’s things you don’t enjoy doing.
Which means that’s certainly something that you would want to outsource.

And when you put them together, is that one role that you want to hire for or is that a couple of different roles? Do you maybe want to hire an accountant to do your finance? Because if you’re like me, I hate anything about finance! Then you’re going to want to make sure that you’ve put that in the best possible place for when the time comes to outsource.

I can now afford an accountant, that’s what I want to do.

Obviously if we’re limited companies we need to have an accountant anyway but if we are freelancing we’re doing our own tax return. Then that’s when we can really look at things, and it also gives us a bit of drive too. Especially if we have noted down we kind of take ownership of the things that we really don’t like doing. When we’ve done that and in my example if it’s finance.

I can then have that as a bit of a goal and a bit of a drive to get more work through the door. So if I maybe can’t afford an accountant at this moment in time. But it’s something that I hate doing and I really want someone else to do it for me. I can have that vision in my head, okay well I need to get one more client once I get that client, I can then get rid of this. And that gives us kind of the fire in our belly to drive the business forward. And it means that you are not going to be sacrificing your personal time to try and do everything in your business.

I could talk about being overwhelmed all day, so I will stop there.

Because this is all about being overwhelmed, I don’t want to overwhelm you with all these things that you can do. But ultimately, in my opinion, these are the most important things that you really need to start with. And once you have got those in place, you are going to be in a really good position to be able to remove feeling overwhelmed from your business and create the life and business that you really wanted to create in the first place.

So, I hope that’s really really helped, I would love to hear any thoughts that you have, or maybe if you have tried implementing any of these tips to stop feeling overwhelmed then let us know. If you are having any trouble with figuring things out, or maybe you just want a sounding board to to work things out on where you should be focusing on at the moment so you can ditch feeling overwhelmed, then drop us a message and if we can help, then we would love to talk to you and help you with that.