Did You Really Sign Up For This?
Being a business owner is freeing! Until you feel trapped.
Creating exceptional work is empowering! Until it leads you to exhaustion. 
Most new business owners dream of success, and fear they won’t attract enough customers. But what happens when you do attract customers and you have more work than you could handle?
Last week I worked with an entrepreneur who had been in business less than 2 years. It didn’t take long before she had filled her calendar with clients.
A great thing? She booked a strategy session with me because she was distraught and in tears.
We analyzed what she offered, how she worked, and who she served. We walked through the details of what was working and what was clearly not.
On the Zoom session I could see the tension drawn all over her face and she cried at 3 points during our session. Feeling her pain, I wanted to cry right along with her but thought it best to focus on what I could do to help her.
Her problem: She was really good at what she did, had a strong work ethic, and her clients, sensing this, kept piling on more work than she could handle. They would also take advantage of the fact that they never heard the word “no” – so they added requests that were out of the box and required extra time and attention.
The impact of the problem: My client had no down–time for herself, ate quick meals at the computer while working, and sometimes couldn’t even take bathroom breaks to meet aggressive deadlines. She was working later than she ever wanted to, doing work she wasn’t trained to do, and feared that the quality of her work was suffering.
Her real problem: looking to be a professional services provider, she wasn’t thinking like a company, and had not set rules and boundaries. She thought being a service provider meant saying yes, always. And, no surprise, she wasn’t charging enough to compensate her for the amount of work, the drain on her energy, and her stress.
During our session, she said, “This isn’t what I had envisioned when I started this business. This isn’t what I signed up for.”
Sound familiar? We have all been there at one point in the development stage of business. For some, this problem has continued far too long. If it’s happening to you, you may tell yourself there’s no way out.
The answer to her problem was (relatively) simple – she needed to own the role of CEO of her company and create rules and processes she and her clients could live by. As I always say, if I banged on the door of Macy’s at 8:30 in the morning because I really needed something right now, the security guard would tell me to go away because the store doesn’t open till 10am, period. You may not be a giant retail company but you are a company, and your customers are expecting you to set up rules, boundaries and processes.
Setting appropriate pricing to match the quality of her work and the value she brought to her clients is another area we corrected – STAT. Can you change your pricing for your current clients? Yes – and you should do so when it’s an appropriate time in your business.
One strategy session corrected a business that felt like a runaway train. Do you have a challenge or situation in your business that feels like it’s gotten away from you? Or a sinking feeling that something’s not working but you can’t see what?
It’s time to book a working strategy session so we can analyze it together and put a solution in place.
Book your strategy session here: https://calendly.com/susana-f/strategy-session