3 Keys To Successfully Scaling A Small Business Without Burnout11 min read
Growing and scaling a business is top of mind for many small business owners – you’re always searching for a way to increase revenue, improve profit, and make more of an impact through your work! But often, that growth can come at a cost – your personal wellbeing.
Most entrepreneurs are exhausted or burnt out.
- 44.7% of founders experience exhaustion,
- 67% of entrepreneurs admit they see no other option but to continue working despite their exhaustion,
- 96% of entrepreneurs have reported feeling burned out at some point and are unsure of how to achieve work life balance!
Hustle culture has become an epidemic in entrepreneurship.
We’ve been told that working harder, faster and longer will get us where we want to go. That once you check all the – never-ending – boxes, you’ll finally be successful. But God forbid you take a moment to rest – you’ll be left in the dust…
It’s no surprise then that most entrepreneurs operate their business in a constant state of anxiety, wondering what they’re missing, worrying about when it might all fall apart, and running at all the things as fast as they can, thinking it will guarantee their success.
If you’ve seen some success in your business, you might believe that if you just keep doing what you’ve been doing, it will keep growing – a common misconception!
The truth is, what got you here, won’t get you there.
At some point, most small business owners will reach a capacity plateau – a point where your business cannot grow any further because you’ve maxed out the resources it needs to operate (this includes you!).
And this is where many entrepreneurs get stuck: banging their head off the wall wondering why their business isn’t growing, when the reality is there’s no room for it TO grow. These business owners do not have the foundations for scaling a business set up, they’re just trying to work longer and harder to achieve their growth goals, to no avail.
American culture valorizes overwork, but what I’ve seen to be true time and time again in scaling my own business (a multiple-six figure business I built working 20 hours a week MAX and traveling up to 5 months at a time) and with my small business clients (ambitious entrepreneurs that are making more while working less) is that your business growth journey doesn’t need to include burnout and scaling a business doesn’t mean working more.
Not only is it possible to scale your business without sacrificing your work life balance, it’s faster and easier too!
(If you didn’t know that prioritizing your happiness leads to greater success, read this article).
3 Keys To Successfully Scaling A Small Business Without Burnout
I’m going to explain the exact keys to focus on when scaling a business (without burnout!) so that you can grow your small business and live a meaningful and fulfilling life.
It starts with knowing why you even want to scale your business in the first place, after all, you’ve got a business that’s generating a good amount of money – why grow?
Know Your Values | The 1st Key To Scaling A Business Without Burnout
Defining why you want to scale is critical to doing it in a way that actually gives you more of what you want and less of what you don’t want.
If you’re focused on scaling a business so that you have the freedom to travel more and be less in the day to day of the company, but you’re trying to get there by working 60 hour weeks and not taking a single vacation, nothing is going to magically change in the future.
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The way you build your business is how you’re going to experience your success.
Nothing magically changes when you hit your revenue goal. The habits you’ve built (working too much and resting too little) will be so deeply ingrained that it will be nearly impossible to shift them when you achieve your goals.
If you know why you’re scaling your business, you’re able to build your why into your day to day.
This means you’re not delaying experiences you can have to some degree right now and you actually feel comfortable enjoying those experiences when the time comes.
While you might not yet be jet-setting to Paris on a weekly basis, even taking a full day off from your business each week to amble about your local park or meet up with friends will help you build the muscle of taking time away from your business to enjoy your life (which is harder than it sounds for most of us high achievers!)
Scaling a business without burnout means intentionally integrating your values into the journey of building your business!
If you value pleasure & joy, ask yourself how you’re building that into your business and day to day life?
If you value calm & peace, start actually taking the time to meditate or do yoga in the middle of the day.
Take time to define your core values so that you can scale your business in alignment with what’s truly important to you.
Your business thrives when you thrive, not the other way around. So if you want to scale a business without burnout, it’s critical that you know your why and build your business in alignment with your values.
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Build A Supportive Team | The 2nd Key To Scaling A Business Without Burnout
One of my coaching clients, let’s call him A, spent years being not just the CEO of his business, but also the Head of Sales and Business Development, and also the technical expert delivering ALL of the services.
He was really struggling to balance delivering the services with landing more sales and didn’t even have the time or energy to work ON the business. When opportunities started coming more quickly, he did not have the foundations for scaling a small business in place – which meant he could barely keep up by burning the candle at both ends (jumping on Zoom calls at 11pm and again at 5am)! He desperately needed to hire a delivery team so that he could focus on being the CEO and steering the business in the right direction – but it felt really challenging at the time.
And I get it – when it comes to letting someone take care of what is essentially your baby (a small business you’ve built from the ground up!), all of our best limiting beliefs and fears will pop up.
- No one else can do it as well as I can
- No one else will care about my business as much as I do
- Managing a team is too much work
- I don’t have time to hire
- Does anyone even exist with this skill set?
- It can’t be possible that someone would actually enjoy this role, why would I burden them with it?
- I can’t afford a team right now
- I don’t know how to lead a team
Sound familiar?
As a small business coach that helps high performers scale a business without burnout, I’ve heard it all!
But the truth is, once you’ve reached the capacity plateau (usually around the $100K – $200K annual revenue mark) like my client A, you can’t afford not to take the time, money, and energy to build a supportive team! Your business depends on it.
If you’re ready to scale your business without sacrificing your work life balance, you must build a supportive team that will help you deliver your service and manage the back end of the operations so that you can focus on what you do best.
Start by identifying what tasks drain the most of your energy and delegate those out first. A generalist virtual/executive assistant is a great place to start – they can take all the little things that eat up headspace off your plate so that you can focus on the big things.
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And any time the thought “I can do this myself / it’s not that hard / it doesn’t take much time” comes up, remember that with every hour of your time that’s freed up in a month, you could go land another sale, which is worth so much more to your business than you clearing out your email inbox.
“Stop paying a CEO rate for something you could pay $25/hour for and start recognizing the value of your time!“
Ana McRae
Streamline your processes and implement better systems | The 3rd Key To Scaling A Business
Scaling a business means making more money (aka delivering more products/services) without doing more work. If your expenses are growing at the same rate as your revenue, you’re not really scaling – your profit is staying the same.
If you want to experience exponential growth with fewer resources, it’s important to streamline processes and automate with systems!
Start by looking at your most common processes – how you onboard a new client, how you deliver your service, how you invoice your customers, how you schedule your calendar – and identify where things can be streamlined (done in fewer steps) or automated!
Again, it’s important not to get caught up in the trap of thinking “it’s not that hard” or “that doesn’t take me too long”! Instead, focus on anything and everything that takes up a shred of your headspace, and take it off your plate so that you can spend more energy on value-add tasks in your business (like sales or thought leadership or working with your clients!)
I have a personal rule of thumb in my company: I will only work on content & clients. Everything else gets outsourced to a system or a team member.
If you’re ready to scale your business without burnout, ask yourself: what are the TWO things I (and only I) can do in my business? What’s everything else on my plate and how can I delegate it, automate it, or streamline it?
As your business grows, your processes and systems have to mature with it! The messy way you figured things out in the beginning is NOT the way you want to scale your business long term. If your processes & systems aren’t ironed out, they will crack under the pressure of additional clients.
So, make sure everything in your business works efficiently, and can sustain 10X the amount of business you’re doing – that’s how you know you’re ready to scale your small business, while maintaining a healthy work life balance!
Growing and scaling a business can be a lot of fun, or it can be exhausting and lead to burnout.
When you choose to integrate your values into your business growth journey, build a team that can support and sustain your vision, and optimize your processes and systems to operate efficiently with more volume of work, you can scale a business without burnout.
But if you fail to put in place the foundations you need for scaling a small business, not only will you have unhappy customers, but you’ll be a miserable CEO.
If you’re not sure where you should be focusing to grow your business right now, take this personalized quiz to find out!
If you’re ready to scale your business while freeing up your time, energy, and headspace to live a more fulfilling life, I’m here to help you! Book a discovery call to explore how 1:1 coaching will help you grow your business with ease – or hear it first-hand from my clients.
Comment below, what’s one change you’re going to make in your business this month to help you scale your business without sacrificing work life balance?
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