IF you are self-employed and you want to improve your work/life balance, then you are blessed and damned. Blessed because you are your own boss, and so can implement any strategy you choose, but damned because it is your business, and you have to deal with the pressure of ensuring that it becomes, or remains, successful.
The self-employed have many pressures. They need to be across all aspects of their business. They don’t want to miss out on clients, so they feel their phone should always be on. They often spend the whole day doing the work and managing their employees, then half the night doing the accounts, ordering stock, and liaising with clients. It’s hard yacka, and they know that ultimately they are financially responsible. If a salaried job doesn’t work out you can walk away and try to find another one, but a business failing is far more complicated and potentially financially debilitating.
How, then, can you implement work/life balance strategies when you are self-employed? Firstly, realistically assess the state of your business. If you graphed the profits and losses, and the revenues and expenses of many businesses over 20 years, it would often look like they were a pretty smooth couple of decades. And yet those who were running them may have felt that in those 20 years they faced a never-ending series of crises and almost continual financial insecurity. How you feel your business is going and how it is actually going may be quite different. It is not unusual to feel anxious about the business, and to think if there are two consecutive days in which the phone doesn’t ring that it is all coming crashing down. So try to conduct a realistic assessment. Take the emotion out of it.
Take the long view. Have a look at your business’s performance over the past few years. Has it been trading upwards, downwards or has it been fairly consistent? It may be helpful to get someone who is not as close to the business as you are to do the assessment for you, or for you to at least run the figures past someone else.
If you find that your business has run reasonably successfully for the past few years, and there is no indication that it is trending downwards, then it is reasonable to assume that if you keep doing things the way you have been doing them, that the business will keep going okay.
Now think about how you have felt about the business in the last few years. Have you been able to turn off from work when you finish for the day? Do you ever really finish for the day, or are you continually thinking about the business? Have you been anxious about how it is performing?
If you worry about your business a lot, the assessment you have undertaken will give you some solid facts with which to confront your anxiety. If you have data that suggests that your business has been consistently running well, use it to challenge your anxious thoughts. When you start to feel anxious, tell yourself that you have spent years fretting about the business, but your analysis has showed that there was really no need to worry. The business has consistently been going okay. And there is no indication of any downward trend.
Don’t get complacent, but remind yourself that if some little thing goes wrong—you miss out on a client, or a customer is dissatisfied—it doesn’t mean it’s the beginning of the end.
Try to fence your work into specific hours. It’s very easy for those running their own businesses to feel that they are always at work.
Work phone calls can easily take over. A call can come in during family dinner, and you feel as if you must take it. Try not taking it. Does anything bad happen?
Most people leave messages. It is very rare for a potential client to ring up, get an answering machine and think, ‘How dare they not answer my call immediately! I’m taking my business elsewhere!’ What they usually do is leave a message. Don’t you miss heaps of calls during the day when you are working on something else? Then why be so afraid of missing them when you are at home?
If you need to, give yourself some time in the evening to return calls, answer emails, do your accounts and anything else administrative. But try to make it after the kids have gone to bed, and see if you can work in a highly focused way and get it all done in an hour or 45 minutes. Treat that time as if you are going back to work. Get in there, work hard and do it. Then stop.
Can you delegate more? When you started your business you probably did almost everything. Are there tasks that you still do that could actually be done just as well by someone else down the line? Remember, you are the boss. It is inefficient for you to be doing tasks that could be performed just as well by those getting paid less.
Do you have a fear of saying no? It’s very common for the self-employed, no matter how busy they are, to always want to take on work because, who knows, this might be the last work they are ever offered ever in their life. They take on everything and then end up horribly overworked. There are many in the building trade who seem to work every Saturday. I can understand doing that at some times during the year, especially if there is a glut of work following a drought, or when you are starting out and trying to build a business, or if you are in real financial need, but many have been working most Saturdays for 20 years. I suspect it’s because they can never bring themselves to say no.
There have been occasions when I have been offered work, felt as if I should take it (because it is, after all, someone offering me work and who knows, that may never happen again) and then as soon as I got off the phone wished I had said no. I have also more recently, when I was busy, said no to jobs and—you know what?—it feels great.
Be realistic in assessing how busy you need to be to pay the bills, and then work out how busy you want to be.
If you are self-employed and you have enough work, then you have the ability to actually determine how much work you do. If things are going well, why not decide to take Fridays off for a month, or have an extra week off during school holidays? You can either say no to some work, or delegate work to others, and still be available by phone if needed. There are plenty of employees in all types of businesses just itching to get more responsibility. Try some of them out. If you find someone who you can trust to do things when you are not there, it gives you much more freedom.
Millions of people envy the self-employed their ability to determine when they work. Maybe you can work late on Wednesdays (when your kids are at soccer practice anyway) and finish early on Thursdays in time to pick them up from school. Be imaginative in how you plan things and use the fact that you are your own boss to your, and your family’s, advantage. You are in the fortunate position where the only person’s permission you need to implement something new is yourself, so take advantage of it.
You may feel that you need to set an example. You might think that if you start working flexible hours your staff will feel they can slacken off too. You don’t need to account to your staff for every minute of your day. There is a general realisation in business that the people who own the business can make their own rules.
If you are not there, you may be at a business meeting, or you may be picking your kids up from school. It’s really none of your staff’s business. They will usually be more concerned with doing their job than wondering if you are doing yours. Employ people who are self-motivated and don’t need constant supervision. People who you can trust. Introduce systems that make everyone accountable for the work they do, and ensure that those systems don’t rely on you having to continually run around checking everything. If you pick the right people and delegate then, as long as they know they are ultimately accountable, many of your employees will thrive on the added responsibility and autonomy. If your business is big enough, get a good manager who can keep an eye on things when you aren’t there.
You can also see the practice of working really hard and efficiently at work, and then getting out of there and enjoying the rest of your life, as setting a good example.
If you make it clear to your staff that you are interested in their output more than their hours, you will give them a greater sense of autonomy and will be likely to inspire in them a desire to work hard, rather than long, which will be good for both them and your business. And think about what your own attitude might be if some of your employees want to implement strategies aimed at balancing their own lives. Perhaps there are benefits in it for the business.
If you are self-employed then your business may also have quiet times; times when you are not as busy as you could be. The temptation during a quiet time is to panic, or at the very least to sit around fretting and waiting for the phone to ring.
Change your attitude.
A quiet time is a holiday in disguise. The only thing that prevents it from being a holiday—or part-holiday—is your attitude.
If you treat a quiet time in your business like a disaster, then you will have a miserable time. If, however, you treat it as an opportunity to work a bit less for a while, then you might find you enjoy it.
Of course that is going to be easier to do if you can be reasonably confident that the quiet time is just that—a temporary period of quiet before normal trading resumes—rather than a permanent downturn. Unfortunately, many of us tend to assume the worst, and that prevents us from making the most of those quiet times. We assume disaster is coming and worry about it.
Apply some analysis. Have a look back at the history of your business. Have you had many quiet times in the past? Is there a pattern as to when they come? Do they arrive at the same time each year, or a month after every interest rate hike? If you can analyse your quiet times, you may be able to plan for them. For example, a real estate agent may be able to predict business slowing in winter, and plan their life accordingly. As the supply of work decreases, try to increase the supply of other enjoyable things you are doing to soak up the time. If you do that, you may even start to look forward to the quiet times.
Of course it is natural in a quiet time to worry that the business will not recover. Remind yourself that lulls have occurred before, and that the business has always picked up again. Look for a reason for the lull. Take some time to think about whether your business has got complacent or lazy. If changes need to be made, make them. But once you have done everything that you can do, try to put it out of your mind and enjoy the time. How silly will you feel if at the end of your life you look back at all these quiet times and realise that none of them were anything to worry about, that they were all just part of the business cycle, but that you had failed to take advantage of the opportunities for rest, recreation, refreshment and family time that they offered because you were too busy worrying about going down the gurgler?