How To Keep Stress Down and Business Growth Up

One of the biggest side effects of entrepreneurship is stress.  Before you started your business, the stress was good stress.  More like excitement and anticipation.  It doesn’t take long for the evil twin, bad stress, to take over and steal your joy.

4 Ways to Reduce Your Stress

Here are several ways to reduce stress as you grow your business:

1. Stay focused on your core business.  By nature, entrepreneurs like to start things. And, if you are like most small business owners, to make your business viable, you probably accepted any work you could actually do, even if it was a slight bit off strategy.  After all, it was revenue.  But trying to manage all kinds of only minimally related products or services creates inefficiency.  Inefficiency creates stress.
2. Hire experts.  Make sure every new hire counts by hiring someone who has a high level of expertise in the area that they are hired.  You cannot be the expert at every functional area of your business.  You need to focus on the area you are most gifted.  So as you grow, hire people with more expertise than you have in the area they are being hired.
3. Build in systems when your business is small.  If you try to get an employee to change a process they have been doing for months or years, then you should automatically embrace this. It is difficult to get people to follow processes, policies or systems period.  But to add them in after they have been just getting the job done, is like rolling a 1,500 pound ball up a hill by yourself.  Stress is the least of it.
4. Invest back into your business.  If you are used to stripping your business each year, or each month, of all extra profits, then as your business grows, your personal income grows.  You get used to it and don’t want to give it back. Without funds to invest in people and systems and growth, guess what, you are doing everything. Doing everything causes stress. Start a savings account day 1. Regardless of how little it starts out, keep saving. It will accumulate and be there when you need to invest in your business.

To truly unlock the secret to reducing your stress, there is one last piece to the puzzle. One that you are completely in control of. It is the key.

Trust.

Trust in the vision God gave you for your core business. Trust the experts you hire. Trust the systems you build and use them. Trust in yourself and your team to invest your hard earned money back into your business to keep it strong and growing.

Remember, to build your business on rock, not sand.

Jesus promises it will hold.  No need to stress!