It’s still spring and I’m still learning the lessons from baseball. Since my previous blog about baseball, I attended a Nashville Sounds game. This game reminded me of a lesson from all team sports…

You can’t do it all yourself and win!

This lesson applies to business, too. Are you a one-person business? If your answer is yes, I can assure you there are many gaps in your business. Just because you CAN do it all, doesn’t mean you SHOULD do it all. The mistake of doing it all causes one of two types of issues in your business. 

1. You are working 70-80 hours per week in order to keep all the things going and moving forward. You might be heading toward exhaustion, overwhelm, and breakdown. 

2. You are working on and in your business barely 20 hours per week and you are having a hard time even keeping the doors open, and maybe you’re going into debt to keep it going.

Neither of these scenarios is sustainable, so let’s fix it.

First fix is the mindset around the story you tell yourself: I can’t afford help. I think this is the opposite: you can’t afford to not have help. I love to play it like a game. I want to hire a coach; the coach costs this much money; how can I afford that this month? Money flows when you stop blocking the flow by staying in your cycle of overwhelm and doing it all yourself. The more you get out of the “have to” chores of your business and into the “want to” chores each day, the more you will be operating in your genius - and the better business will be. 

I always align this in my business with bookkeeping. I love math and numbers, data and stats, but I found every month when it was time to do the bookkeeping I would stall, procrastinate, and let them pile up. It was ridiculous. I could be doing this chore, but I really just didn’t want to. After a bit of shaming myself around this, I discovered the thing I hated was entering every receipt and matching it up, and making all the numbers align perfectly. I hired someone to do it. Now I just get my P&L at the end of each month and I can look at all the data and stats I want. I know where all my money went and what I spent it on without having to do the actual bookkeeping. And, an added bonus, I also got to hire another woman entrepreneur and help her increase her business. 

The next fix is one where you seriously reflect on your business. If you’re barely making it, why? Is it still your passion and what you want to do every day? Do you bound out of bed, excited about doing it? What does your schedule look like? Does it align with your priorities and passion? What is one step today you can take to move your business forward? 

I find this is a hard one to fix sometimes because we are too close to the problem. From the outside, an experienced business coach or strategist can see if the business is even viable, if it’s what you really want to be doing, and then how to fix the flow so you are making money. The caveat here is that the coach or strategist is willing to tell you hard things you might not want to hear. 

It also calls for personal introspection on the reason why you’re doing business and what you really want to do. Some people don’t have goals of becoming a millionaire, their goals and why are different - and that’s okay! Look at your success through your lens, not when you’re comparing yourself to others. But also be truthful with yourself and your goals, so you can see if they are attainable and sustainable. 

I invite you to Build Your Dream Team. If you need referrals, here is my Dream Team Directory to get you started: https://buildyourdream.team/