From Burnout to Boundaries

Speaker A00:00:32

Running a business isn't easy. It's long hours, tough calls and relentless pressure. No shortcuts, no handouts. Just grit, grind and the will to keep going when most would quit.Welcome to Grit and Growth Business. The show for entrepreneurs who know success is built the hard way.Hosted by Ralph Estep Jr. A seasoned business coach, accountant and fellow fighter in the trenches. Each episode brings you real talk, proven strategies and the unfiltered truth about what it really takes to build something that lasts.Because if you've got persistence, perseverance and determination, this is the place for you. This is Grit and Growth Business. Hello, friends. Ralph Esip Jr. Here. Welcome to Grit and Growth Business Live.A little technical difficulty as we got started there. Our usual entrance theme didn't play. But that's okay. We're going to roll with it.So whether you're tuning in live right now or you're catching us on the replay later tonight, I want you to hear something right from the start. You're not just watching a show here. You're stepping into a movement.It's a movement for real small business owners who built something with their own two hands. People like you who sacrifice to push past fear and believe that growth is possible even when the road gets hard.Every week we talk about real stories. I'm talking about real grit, real growth, not theory like you're reading some textbook.Not fake success influencers nonsense but, but the truth about what it takes to build a business the hard way, the right way. And before we dive in, I want to remind you we got a brand new action sheet, deep dive resources and community discussions waiting for you.And you can join that by going to grit and growth business.com join again. That's gritandgrowthbusiness.com join if you want coaching, if you want accountability, clarity and people who get it, that's where you belong.All right, well, let's jump in because tonight's topic is one of the ones that every business owner knows deep down. And I want to start with a question tonight and it's going to be a hard question.Have you ever hit that point where your business starts stealing the joy that made you start it? A lot of people think about that and they say, you know what, Ralph, I've worked with clients over 30 years now.Those late nights, they just aren't a hustle anymore, more like a survival. Whether you're technically successful but you're feeling exhausted, you're feeling short tempered. Honestly, I said this a couple months ago.Maybe you're starting to hate your business. Or maybe even feeling a little resentful about it.If you've ever felt like your business is running you instead of the other way around, I want you to stay with me tonight because we're talking about something that destroys more businesses than taxes, destroys more businesses than inflation and competition combined. And that's an ugly word, but it's burnout.And more importantly, tonight, I want to show you how to build boundaries that protect your life, reclaim with joy, and your ability to lead. So here's what we're going to cover tonight. We're going to start with the pressing issue of the week. And that's why business owners burn out.And I'm going to share with you three boundaries to protect your time, your energy, and your mental clarity. Then I've got five great listener questions from inside the grit and growth community. These are from real business owners.Dealing with overwhelm, dealing with stress, and feeling like I can't keep doing it this way. At the end, something important. I'm going to give you an invitation to grow in a community that will walk this out with you.I'll leave you struggling alone in the dark. So this episode might be the pivot point you've been needing. So let's get into it.We're going to start like, like we do every week on a live show with our pressing issue of the week. And I call this from burnout to boundaries. And you can see on the calendar, we just flipped the calendar into December. We're at the end of the year.Everybody's making plans. Everybody's setting those goals. And listen, I'm going to tell you right now, I hate New Year's resolutions. A lot of people are doing those.But a lot of small business people are dreaming about what next year's revenue is going to look like. There's something most owners won't admit out loud. You're tired. You're deeply tired. Not I need a weekend away tired, but soul tired.My mom used to call it bone tired. I mean, you're tired down to the bone kind of tired that makes you forget why you even started the business in the first place.The kind of tired to turn small problems into big explosions. The kind of tire that makes you start thinking, maybe I should just walk away from this. Maybe this isn't worth it. Maybe I'm not cut out for this.Ask you right now, have you ever felt that? And the truth is, burnout doesn't show up all at once. It's slow. It's sneaky. If you don't catch it early. It will take your joy. It'll take your peace.Hey, for so many of us, it's taken our family and it can even take your business with it. But I want you to understand something right from the jump tonight. Burnout is not a sign of weakness. It's just a sign of overload.And an overload can be fixed. So tonight, I'm gonna give you three boundaries that I teach my coaching clients. Boundaries that bring peace back into your business and your life.We'll start with the first one. Boundary number one, time without access. Here's the truth. You can't operate 100% when your business has 24. 7 access to you. Trust me, I've tried this.Most small business owners aren't struggling because the work is hard. They're struggling because the work is constant. It just never stops. So here's what you need to start off with. You need protected time.That protected time is a time when no clients can reach you. You leave the phone at the side. You don't answer that phone. You're not available. No business problems can interrupt you.How many times have you tried to take a weekend away? Just a business problem just followed you right where you were going. And no notifications control you.I don't know about you, but man, I feel like I'm controlled by notifications all the time. I tell my clients this all the time. If they can reach you anytime, you're not running a business, you're running an emergency room.And unless you got a comma MD or do after your name, you're not a doctor. So the first thing I'm going to tell you right now is block some time for yourself. Guard it. And you've got to train your clients to respect it.So that's the first boundary number one. Boundary number two is what I call clear work modes. As a small business owner myself, and if I'm being honest, most of us mix everything together.What I'm talking about there is the admin work, the operations work, the selling work, fixing problems, putting out fires, answering calls, doing payroll. You just mix it all together and one big old box of mess all at once. But that chaos right there is going to burn you out.But I've got a solution for you right now. What I encourage you to do is what? Create what I call work modes. What am I talking about? Looks like this.Set aside certain times of your day where you do certain things. Like for example, maybe you have an admin mode.This is the time when you're working on administrative stuff, handling the paperwork that's piling up on your desk or stuff you've been putting off for a while. I had an hour or two of that today. My admin mode. I went through my desk, there was a bunch of stuff stacked up there.I said I got to get through this. I put on my admin hat. Other times you want to go into production mode. I did a little bit of that today too.I needed to get some financial reports out to some clients. I had some emails. I needed to respond to another mode. A lot of people get into a sales mode. Actually had a better 20 minute sales mode today.But again, understand the thinking here. You're. You're intentionally deciding to focus on that mode. Sometimes you got to get into a deep work mode. But here's the problem.A lot of small business owners don't understand. You've got to also set aside time for what I call CEO mode. It's not the time when you're in ad mode.You're not putting out fires, you're not trying to sell, you're not doing deep stuff. You're actually acting like a CEO, because that's the difference.If you really want your business to be successful, you got to spend an equal amount of time in CEO mode. But the thing a lot of small business owners don't understand is you can really only do one mode at a time. So that's my encouragement for you.Do one mode at a time. No switching, no juggling. Because when work becomes cleaner, your brain becomes cleaner. And that's really what this is.It's sort of a mind game we're playing with ourself and we can have a clear mind. We're going to drop our stress instantly. And here's my third boundary breaker, a system for what's next.So many of us are in that mode of this picture. We got the fire hose. We're just constantly putting out fires because we don't know what's next. We don't know what's around that turn.And burnout thrives in that level of uncertainty. It's that feeling of walking into your office thinking, I don't even know where I'm going to start today.That's a problem if that's what you walk into your office every day. The problem is you don't have a good plan. Don't ever go into your office. I don't even know where I'm going to start today.You need a simple weekly system, something like this on Monday morning. And I'm going to encourage you, maybe do it on Sunday evening, set up a little plan for yourself. And it doesn't have to be elaborate.What matters most this week? Write it down. These are the things that I must do this week. What can't wait? There are certain tasks. I had certain tasks today I had to get done.They needed to get done today. And here's one you can really relish. And that's what's not my job anymore. We talked about this a couple weeks ago, we talked about delegation.But so many small business people get burned out because they forget about that one. That's not my job anymore. I use a temple, a simple tool called the rule of three priorities. I'm gonna lay it out for you right now.Every week, I want you to pick three of those things, only three, and win the week. By winning those three, everything else becomes noise. And when you do that, burnout starts losing its grip. Let me ask you this.Which boundary do you need the most right now? Really think about it for yourself. Is it at first boundary that time without access?So many of us small business owners, we're just always available for our clients because that's what we want to do. We want to please our clients. We're pleasing people. We realize that they pay our bills, they help our business be successful.But if we constantly give them access, we're not having any time for ourselves. Maybe for you it's that clear work mode you really need to focus on. You know what, Ralph? That's a great idea. I'm going to focus on admin mode.I'm going to focus on sales mode. I'm going to focus on production mode. But then I'm going to also put a time aside for CEO mode.Or maybe for you, it's just a system to define what matters. Maybe you feel like you're constantly in that fire, that fire resolve type thing. You're always putting out fires.But maybe if you had a system and just pick three things that you're going to focus on this week. So I want to encourage you right now, what are those things?Because here's the thing, admitting that admitting what is causing your burnout is actually the first step to fixing it. So I hope this has been helpful. Again, those are our three big boundary. Time without access, clear work modes, and a system to define what matters.If you can embrace those things, I'm going to tell you right now, you're going to do a world of benefit to yourself to break out of that burnout. How about we get to our questions? I said we got some great listener Questions, and we're going to jump right into the first one.The first question comes to us from Maria in Lancaster Penns, not too far from here.You know, I was telling my producer Abby, before we got started, it is cold here in Delaware and just north of us where Lancaster is, actually, they're getting quite a bit of snow up there. We just missed the snow by a little bit. Let me tell you. It has been raining like crazy here today.If this had been snow, we'd have been shoveling out. But anyway, it's cold. It's like 38 degrees here. You know, I get older, I get cold. I tell people I don't want to. But anyway, enough of that.Let's get back to this question. It's from Maria in Lancaster Penns. What Maria writes, she said, ralph, I own a small salon. I love my clients, But I'm working 70, 80 hours a week.If I slow down, I lose money. If I keep going, I'm going to collapse. How do I get my life back?Maria, this is a common thing I hear all the time from people, especially in your industry. I've got a few clients that work in an industry. My son is actually a barber, my youngest son. And it's the truth.Like, if he doesn't work, he doesn't get paid. It's like you said. But if you don't take a break, you're going to collapse. And, Maria, you're carrying the pressure that thousands of owners carry.And I've heard this from many people that I've coached, many clients I've worked with. They have this feeling that if they stop, everything stops.Maria, you're exhausted, you're overwhelmed, and you're secretly afraid of disappointing everyone around yourself. That's a tough spot to be in. But I've got some ideas for you, Maria, and that's why you wrote into the show.And I want to give you some action points that you can act on right now. First thing I see here, and this is going to be a little counterintuitive, I think you might need to raise your prices.You might be saying, ralph, where is that coming from? Well, if you've got more business than you can handle, you're working 80 hours a week.Maybe you need to thin the herd down a little bit there, because even a small increase give you back hours without sacrificing profit. See if you can make more with less, you're going to be farther ahead. I worked with a client many times. I remember a particular one.He was a window cleaner. I may have Told this story on the show. If I did, I apologize.He was a window cleaner, and he came into me and he said, ralph, I got more business than I can handle. I said, well, double your prices. And he says, but if I double my price, I'm gonna lose some business. I said, I hope so. So he raises prices some.Long story short, he got to the point where he was able to actually almost triple his prices. He was making more profit and he was working less hours. So, Maria, that might be the first place to go.If your salon is full to the gills, maybe you need to strategically increase your prices. Here's another idea specific to your business. Maybe create some no booking blocks. Maria, you probably control your calendar.So you can either control it, it's going to control you.So one of the things that I do in my own practice as an example is I block off a certain amount of time every week so that I have time to handle things that I need to handle.If I just made myself available to every call, every client, every zoom meeting, everyone to come in and see me, and I didn't give myself that breathing room, then the only person I have to blame is myself. And if I wasn't doing that. And, Maria, I hear this in your question. Maybe for you, it's controlling you.We'll start putting in some no booking blocks. We talked about those modes. Maybe you have a planning mode during the day. Maybe you have that CEO mode. Here's another idea for you, Marie.Build a training system. Maybe it's time to hire somebody. Maybe hire somebody and take that bottom 20% of the task off your plate.You don't have so much to do, because I don't hear you saying this, but I kind of hear you saying it between the lines. And that is rough. I've got clients coming into her. I understand how that is with a salon. You're busy.The person my wife goes to, she's got one person in one chair, another person under the dryer, Another person's got color on her hair, and she's, like, dancing all around during that time. Well, maybe for you, Maria, there's a way to hire somebody to handle some of that stuff.Maybe you can have somebody do the shampooing for you or somebody do the. I'm not.Not that, you know, I don't know all the things about that, but I'm just saying, like, there might be a way to take some of that task off of you. And here's another great idea for you, Marie. And I've seen a lot of hair Salons do this.Maybe you need to turn your business, your busiest times into your premium pricing windows. You might be saying, wait a second, Rob, what are you saying there? Hey, if it's a high demand time, maybe that's a time to raise your prices again.Probably goes against the grain of what you're thinking, but you're in a position right now that if you continue on the path you're in, you're going to burn out and you're going to be good to anybody, including yourself. Well, how about you? As we're talking about this, have you ever had that season where hours went up but the joy went down?It's a very place is a very easy place to be. You know, as an accountant that does a lot of tax work, I feel this during tax season.So one of the things that I do at the beginning of taxing, I go to my calendar and I block off sometimes, like, I can't meet with everybody every single moment. I'm gonna tell you, last year, by about the second week in February, my book was full. So this year, I gotta be more.A little more strategic about that. But maybe you felt that same way. So, Maria, that is my plan for you. Start to be more intentional about what you're gonna do.All right, well, let's move on to our second question. And this one comes to us from Greg from Roanoke, Virginia. What a beautiful place. Been there a few times. Roanoke is a beautiful part of the country.And Greg says this Ralph, I run a small construction company. My crew is great, but they call me for every decision. I can't get anything done because I'm babysitting grown adults.Man, when I read that question, I was like, wow, that's a tough situation there. And Greg, I understand what you're saying, because, Greg, you're feeling trapped between wanting quality work and wanting peace.And you're trying to balance these two things. And that's not an easy thing to balance. And I think in a lot of ways you've realized that you're the bottleneck to this.And I don't know what went on in your business. I have an idea that maybe you're a bit of a micromanager and maybe you've set a tone that you want your. Your crew to constantly be calling you.It's not a good place to be either, because you know they're not going to accomplish anything unless you're there to help them. I'm coaching a client right now that sort of is in the same situation.I told him, look, one of the things you've got to do is you've got to hire a person like an operations manager or foreman and then you've got to put that person in a position of authority where they can do something. So make sure you've got a good training plan and all that sort of thing.But here, Greg, I've got some great ideas for you, some action points that you can take right away. First thing I'm encourage you to do is create a decision making rule. And it could look something like this.You might say to your people in the job, listen, if it's under $200 or under 20 minutes, make the call yourself. If they're on the construction site and they need to go buy something, they need to do something.Maybe in your particular situation you have a rule, a decision making rule. Listen, if it's going to be $200 or less than 20 minutes, make the call. You don't need to call me for any of those things.Again, it depends on your particular situation, but that may be an option for you. Another thing I'm going to encourage you to do, and I've seen a couple of clients in the construction industry do this.Use what I call the morning huddles. Kind of like a football analogy, right? You get in the huddle before the day starts. Set some expectations before the day starts.Let your people know what your expectations are. If they go out on the job and they don't see you, guess what? Well, they say while the mice is away or while the cat's away, the mice will play.I had that backwards, didn't I? But you understand what I'm saying. So maybe first thing in the morning say, okay, here's the scope of the job we're going to do today.Here are the things that I want you to accomplish.Here's how much time I'm expecting this to take because then you've set expectations and then maybe they have to call you because maybe something happened. Maybe they're working on a plumbing and a part by a pipe burst or something like that. Well, those are things you need to be aware of.But I got a feeling, Greg, that you're not doing a good job of setting expectations with your people at the front end. If you don't set those expectations, the only person to blame is you.Here's another idea again, I think you might be doing a little micromanaging here. So one of the ideas you could do is give authority with guardrails.Yes, you got to give them authority because people won't rise until you Let them rise. Because what I hear you saying is you've got people out on the job, but every time they go to make a decision, you go, oh, I gotta call Greg.Oh, I gotta call Greg. What that tells me is they're scared to make decisions.Either they're incompetent, they don't know what they're doing, or they're scared to make decisions. Either way, you've got to do something. Either train them better, find better people, or give them the ability to have the authority.Give them the responsibility and the authority at the same time. Here's another great idea, and I've seen businesses flourish with this.Reward independent thinking if you got somebody that's willing to make a decision.I remember when I was running to credit, and I've talked about that on show before, I had a few people, key people that I would reward if they thought something through. Even if they made a decision, that wasn't the decision that I ultimately would have made.If they thought it out, if there was some independence in there, they had a rationale for it. Because that's going to do. It's going to build a culture. Because right now, I think you've got a culture of, well, we better call Greg.We better call Greg, see what's going to happen next. And how about you, if you're listening or watching right now, have you ever felt like you're paying a team but still doing all the thinking?And I think, Greg, that's exactly what you're doing right now. You're paying a team to work, but you're doing all the thinking.And you got to fix that, Greg, because if you don't fix that, you are the bottleneck, you are the opposition to accomplishing anything with your business.So I just encourage you right now, Greg, try some of the things we talked about tonight, because you might find you're not getting bugged as much now. Be prepared. They might make some decisions. You're like, that was a real bonehead decision. So have that morning huddle.Give them authority, give them some guardrails. Make sure they understand what you're happy with them making, but allow them to be independent thinkers. Okay, let's move to our third question.Our third question comes to us from Danielle from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And Danielle writes this. Ralph, customers message me everywhere. Email, Facebook, text, Instagram. If I don't reply instantly, they get upset.How do I set boundaries without losing business? Oh, so, Danielle, you're one of those folks that's available everywhere.I hear people say that all the time in Advertisements, you can find me everywhere. Not sure that's a good plan for a long term strategy.Might be great when you're first getting started, Danielle, but I feel right now you're probably feeling a little stuck. You're kind of like that light switch that's always on. You're stuck in that trap, but at the same time you feel guilty for saying no.But you're also exhausted because you're saying yes all the time. That's a tough situation to be in. I remember when I was first starting my accounting practice, I had a particular client. It was a Saturday morning.I'll never forget this. She called me at seven o' clock in the morning. I had given her my personal cell phone number for some reason and I answered her call.And I remember my wife said to me, she goes, ralph, who in the world is calling you at 7am It's a Saturday. And I said, well, such and such. She had a concern. And my wife said, she said, ralph, listen, there are no accounting emergencies like that.But I had set that tone myself. I had put myself out there. I had given my customers the ability to contact me because I didn't want to miss that call.And I felt guilty if I said no about something. But who was to blame for that? It was me. So Danielle, here's some ideas, some action points that you can take right away.First thing I'm going to encourage you to do, you got to move away from all of those communications channels. Those are great. If you have people in your organization that can monitor those things for you, fantastic.But for you, you need to create a single communications channel for business. Message me here, call this number, leave a message here, send an email, send a text. Pick one.Don't have 15 ways that they can contact you because if you do that, guess what's going to happen? They are going to constantly be calling you and calling you. So create that single communications channel.There's another thing I'm going to encourage you to do. A lot of people don't like these, but I really lean into these. Set an autoresponder with expectations.If your main communications channel is email, here's one of the things I think it's very fair for you to do is have an automated response that goes out to the person. Hey, I got your message. I will return this information. I'll return this, this message within 24 hours and then stick to that.Because if you set an expectation, your customer is not going to say, well, you know, I reached out for Danielle. She never got back to Me, but they got that message. I do this in my own accounting practice.If my staff doesn't answer the phone, we have an internal belief structure. If it's an important issue, we're going to get back to them within three hours.If someone sends me an email, goes into our ticketing system, we actually use a product called Zendesk. It's like a fancy customer relationship management software.But if I see something come in and I don't have time to answer it, right there, I have a little button I can push. It says, I got your. I got your question. I will respond to you within 24 hours. But I set the tone. There's no.There's no drop in that ball of expectation. You're saying to the customer. You're saying to the client, I hear you. You've been heard. I've told you, contact me on this channel.And here's my expectation. Now here I'm gonna tell you something, Danielle. You better make sure you respond before 24 hours or right at 24 hours.Because one thing you don't want to do is set an expectation and then don't meet it. That's a bad plan. Another thing I'm going to encourage you to do, Danielle, is use business hours and stick to them.Like my wife said, Saturday morning, 7am There are no accounting emergencies. Wrapped. Now, listen, if I was an OB GYN and I was delivering babies, that'd be a different story.You know, then there might be a reason why somebody's going into labor. Guess what? Saturday morning, Sunday morning, it don't matter, too. You got to get to the hospital.But, Danielle, you didn't tell me what kind of business you have. But my suspicion is you've just not allowed yourself to set boundaries, and that's your own fault.I'm not picking on you, Danielle, but you've made this decision to not set those boundaries. So stick to them. And finally, here's the thing I'm going to tell you. Train your best customers, because good boundaries attract great clients.If you want to be honest, here's the truth. Your best customers are going to respect your boundaries. If they don't, they're not the right customers for you.And I know that's a hard thing to say because so many small business people want to get every single customer. Ralph, I don't want to lose a single opportunity. But I've said it on this show time and time again.Sometimes it's great to take a break and find the right customers. And I see we got a question here. And if you didn't know, this is a live show. So I got a question here from Bellator 2020.What is the best way to deal with supervisors that are micromanaging their employees? Well, that's a great question. Let me think about that for a second.So what you're saying here is you've got supervisors that are micromanaging their employees. My question for you is, are you the supervisor of the supervisor? Are you micromanaging them? So I would start there.You know, it sounds to me like you've got a culture going on here. It sounds to me like the person that you have in a manager spot or supervisor spot doesn't understand delegation. They don't.Maybe they don't have respect for the people that are working for them. That could be part of the problem, too. If you want to give me some more details, Bellator, I'll be happy to answer that.That's really a good question, though, because again, it goes back to a corporate culture like we talked about with Greg. Is it a corporate culture where people are afraid to make decisions?Is that person micromanaging it because they're feel micromanaged by somebody above them? Those are the type of things. But you're right, that's going to lead to burnout. But in that case, it's not going to lead to burnout from the manager.It's going to lead out to burnout from the employees because they're not given any responsibility, they're not given any authority. Just you do this, you do this like automaton robots. People don't like that. They're not going to live long in that atmosphere. So great question.Thank you so much for sharing that. But getting back to what we were talking about, you got to be honest, as a business person, do you feel pressured to reply instantly as well?I know I felt that. I feel that sometimes to this day, if somebody sends me an email, it pops up on my phone. I feel like I got to answer that right away.But the problem is, when you do that, you're setting a boundary. Or let me say it better, you're breaking a boundary and you're setting a tone for this is the exercise. I'll give you a great example of this.Abby's in the chat right now. Abby is my producer. She helps me out with the show.And I've said to Abby many times, listen, first thing you need to understand is Abby is in an opposite time zone as to me. So Abby works at night when we're in the daytime and vice versa. But that's her decision. That's what she decided to do.But the thing that Abby have had to say to her is, Abby, I don't stop. I work and work and work and work.And I said, if I send you a message on a Saturday afternoon, my expectation is you don't have to answer that right away. I'm saying to her, listen, I'm comfortable with your boundary. But now that goes both ways.Because if Abby says, well, Ralph, I'm just going to handle because I want to please, I want to get the job done, that's fine. But then you've set that boundary. You've allowed that boundary to expand past that.So that's what you have to really understand because there's a lot of pressure on both sides. So if you feel like and this really kind of goes back to that micromanaging thing.If you are being micromanaged, maybe you have to say to your supervisor, listen, and don't do it in front of a lot of people, but call them aside and say, listen, I want you to, I want to talk about this situation here with work. I feel like I'm being micromanaged here.Now, you don't go in there with the fingers pointing and screaming and hollering at them, but you say, listen, I would really like to understand how I could be more, get more authority, more responsibility on the job, because you've got to set that boundary, too. The boundaries work both ways. Why don't we move on to question number four, and if you've got any other questions, feel free to put them in the chat.We got a few people in the chat tonight, which is great. But let's move on to our fourth question, and this is from Tom in Savannah, Georgia.Their weather's a little bit better down there today, but I think it's been cool down that way, too. But this is Tom for Savannah Joy says Ralph. I own a small H Vac business, heating and air conditioning.If you don't know what that means, I haven't taken a vacation in four years. Every time I try something breaks or a client has an emergency. Is it even possible to take a time off?As an owner man, that is a question I hear all the time, and it's a question I've lived to be blunt. I remember a couple years back I took a cruise and I was like, I don't know how I'm going to do this.There's going to be things going on at the office. I just had to say, look, it's going to have to the People that are going to have to figure it out. And Tom, I know what you're feeling.You're feeling like you're chained to the business. No matter what you do, you can't break away because there's always something breaking. There's always a client that has an emergency.But maybe you got to live like I live and realize that not everything is an emergency. But the problem is, Tom, you're at risk of burning out. And it's so deep right now for you.And if you don't change this right now, you might not recover and your business might just fail. Tom, I know that's some tough love, dude, but you got to hear that.Because if you can't take time off, if you can't take the time to rest, you will burn out. You need to just set some boundaries. So let me give you some ideas of some things you can do, Tom. Now, I don't know a lot about your business.I'm making an assumption that you have employees and you've got multiple people. If it's just you, that's going to make this a little bit more complicated. But here's one thing I'm going to recommend that you do, Tom.Cross train your top technician to handle emergencies. Now, maybe that person can't handle every single emergency, but maybe they can handle some of them.Maybe you say, look, four nights a week, I'm going to handle them. The other two nights or three nights, you're going to handle them. Work out some kind of arrangement so you've got some clear downtime.You've got to build that into your schedule. Now if you're working on yourself, then maybe what you need to do is what I talked about earlier with the hair salon lady.Maybe you need to increase your prices. Maybe that's the problem. Your prices are too low because you're trying to please everybody.Trying to get every single, every single contract, every single estimate. You want to win that client, that's great, but it's not working, is it, Tom? And you're getting burned out. Here's another idea.Implement what I call a tiered availability plan with premium pricing for after hours. I got a plumbing client doing this right now. If you've got a problem after, let's pick nine o' clock at night.It's probably earlier than that, but let's just say 9 o' clock at night automatically you're getting charged an extra nighttime call out fee. What? That does two things. Number one, it's going to reward you for your efforts.If you have to Go out there because it's a true emergency and the person is going to pay it because, like, they need that situation resolved. You got a, you got a busted pipe or your water is not working. I don't care what time of the night it is, you're going to pay somebody to fix it.But the other thing it will do is it'll cut back on the nonsense emergencies, those ones that really are an emergency, like, oh, Ralph, this is an emergency. I got to get there right away. But is it an emergency? No, it's not. I'll give you a great example of this.Plumber once told me, ralph, I went into this house, they called me because it's a big emergency. One of the toilets isn't functioning. And I said, okay. And he said, I got to run out there. It's 12 o' clock at night.I think when the kids stuck something down in it, you know, it wasn't overflowing or anything, but they need to get this toilet fixed. And I said to them, I said, do they have one bathroom in the house? He goes, no, Ralph, here's the best part. They got three bathrooms.I said, so what you're telling me it really wasn't an emergency? Maybe it's an emergency to them.But if you had that tiered pricing and they called you 11 o', clock, 12 o' clock at night, and you were available to take their call, and that's a whole nother discussion. Then you say to them, listen, Automatically there's a $300 emergency call out fee. They might have said, you know what?I don't think it's a big emergency. As a thought, we can handle this tomorrow. So that's an idea, Tom, that might work. Here's another idea.Plan your time off 90 days in advance so the team can prepare. Because maybe that's part of the problem, is maybe you're feeding into this ego situation where you're like, you know, I haven't taken a vacation.And that's a badge of courage. I don't have time to take a vacation. That's your own decision. But build it into the calendar.And when you build into the calendar, make sure you've got things in place to prepare for that.That might mean you maybe, maybe, maybe if you're by yourself, you partner with another person in the industry and say, listen, I'm going to take off a week. Can I send you my emergency calls? Maybe you can make a deal with that person that they do the same thing about. Think about a little outside the box.Once In a while. But prepare those things in advance. You're not going to have that.Oh, I'm going to get away this weekend because you've got a business to run, but you can certainly put something together for three months down the road. Put the plans in place. My oldest son says this all the time. If you failed a plan, then you're going to fail. Here's another idea, Tom.This one might work for you. Delegate one major responsibility before you leave. If you've got that technician, maybe say, look, tag, you're it. Here's the emergency phone.I've seen clients do that. They have an emergency cell phone, and they pass that puppy around. Tonight, Joe's got the emergency phone. Next night, Lou's got it.The next night, Sally's got it. You get the idea. But delegate that stuff. And as you're watching and listening right now, when's the last time you had a real deal?See, a lot of people say, well, Ralph, I'm going to take a day off and take a vacation. And their vacation is they got their cell phone in one ear, they got their laptop in front of them. They're. They're talking to clients.They're talking to all these people. That's not a vacation. A lot of people say, well, I'm sort of working on the phone. But that's not a real break. You need a real break.I said this to Abby today. Abby's been having a little struggle with her health, and I'm sure she's not going to mind me saying this. And I said, are you feeling better?She goes, ralph, I think I just needed some rest. Well, listen, if you're a small business owner, you need rest, too.Because if you don't give your body a time to rest, your body is going to push back, and you are going to reach a point where you can't function. And when you can't function, that's worse. Well, let's move on to our fifth and final question tonight.And again, if you've got any questions, feel free to put them in the chat. I'm happy to answer them, but here's our fifth question for tonight. And this comes to us from Heather from Columbus, Ohio.Ralph, I run a growing bakery. Now, see, this is making me hungry. Abby's sitting here watching me as I record tonight.And I don't know about Abby, but, man, sometimes I hear the word bakery, and I'm like, that sounds really good. But anyway, not to take a big distraction, but. So, getting back to Heather's question, business is good.But I'm overwhelmed by decisions, hiring, pricing, scheduling, promotions. Heather, you're overwhelming me just giving me that list. I feel like I'm always making the wrong choice.Ah, there's a lot going on here, Heather, let's break this down. Because really what you're talking about here is what they call decision fatigue. That's a big fancy term.I say I won't use fancy terms, but that's what we're talking about here. And decision fatigue hits owners hard because most small businesses, you don't have a corporate boardroom of a bunch of people making decisions.You are the decision maker. Yes. You handle the hiring, you handle the pricing, you handle the scheduling, you handle the marketing, the promotion. You do it all.You're putting out the fires, you're building the fires, you're doing it all. And if you're the one that's always making decisions, that decision fatigue will set in. And Heather, I'll tell you one thing right now.You don't need more effort. My suspicion is you need more structure because you're second guessing what you're doing. What did you say here?I feel like I'm always making the wrong choice. Why are you second guessing yourself? I have no idea about your business, but if you're second guessing yourself, that's part of it.It's that self talk. See, we all have this self talk.I remember when I was a kid, he used to watch his cartoons and you had the good guy and the bad guy, one on each shoulder. Well, it's the same thing with the self talk. Because, Heather, what I hear you saying is, Ralph, I don't know if I'm making the right choices.And you don't know if you're making the right choices because you don't have good systems in place. So here's what I'm gonna encourage you to do. And I think this is the big one. Talked about this at the beginning of the show.Heather, you need a weekly CEO hour. My suspicion is you spend all your time in that bakery. You're cooking and you're cleaning, you're straightening up.You're making beautiful pies and cakes again. It's making me hungry. But you gotta carve out some time to be a CEO, Be a business owner. No baking. Turn off the ovens.Here's one thing I'm encouraging. Maybe leave the bakery just a time for thinking, time for planning, time for making high level decisions. Because I bet this is what's going on.You've got buns in the oven, you got cakes, you're decorating and you're trying to make high level decisions. All this all at the same time. You're in that multifunction mode we talked about earlier. So that's the first thing. Set aside that weekly CEO hour.Not bacon, just planning your business, making high level decisions, thinking through things. Because when you set aside that time, you're going to start to break that decision fatigue. Here's another thing I'm going to encourage you to do.I want you to apply some filters to your life, what I call priority filters. Ask yourself these three questions. Number one, does this decision grow revenue? See, a lot of small business people get stuck on that one.Well, I got to make this decision, Ralph. I got to make the. Okay, but ask yourself a simple question. Does this grow revenue?If it doesn't grow revenue, maybe it's not the right decision to make. Now, there might be another reason. We're going to two other ones here, but that's the first thing. Does it grow?Second thing, does this reduce my workload? Because maybe it doesn't grow revenue, but it reduces your workload. It saves you money. Both of those things are equally valuable.But you've got to ask yourself that question. Does it grow revenue? Does it reduce the workload? Or finally, does it improve quality?If you apply those three filters to every single decision you make, you're going to start feeling better about your decisions because you've got a system in place to understand those decisions. Does it grow revenue? Does it reduce workload, and does it improve quality? Here's another idea for you.A lot of people get stuck in making tough decisions because they have too many choices. I don't know about you, but if you ever go to a diner like New Jersey, just not far from Delaware, has these diners.I was going to call the other day, this guy was talking about New Jersey diners. He said, you go in there and it's like you go into the menu is a book. I'm talking 20 pages long. Cheesecake Factory is like that.You go into the cheesecake area, they give you this book. I'm like, I don't even know where to start, dude. It's like reading War and Peace. It's like page after page and chicken to chicken to fish.My mind goes crazy. And a lot of small business owners do the same thing. They give themselves this menu of millions of choices.So maybe the better thing is to have fewer options. Because when you have fewer options, you're going to make better decisions. It's what I call green light and red Light thinking.Give you a little bit of a sideline here. I'd love this. For small businesses, set aside time for what I call green light thinking.Get a pad of paper or a piece of paper, whatever you use to take notes. And if you've got something in your head, a problem you need to fix, turn on the green light and write down every single thing that comes to mind.Just write it down. Don't second, I could do this. I could do this. I could do this. I used to do this in organizations. It works great.But just turn on that green light and just whatever comes, no second guessing it. No thinking about, well, that can't work.No, no, just write it down, whatever those things are, put it all on the paper, then take 15 minutes and walk away from it. Okay, that's the green light. Then the red light goes up. Go back to that piece of paper and then start to think, okay, well this won't work because.And this one won't work because. And what you end up finding is one of those green light things. It'll probably solve the problem. But what have you done there?You've limited your choices. You said, okay, I had this green light. I had this wrong laundry list of things like Santa's list, right? I got all this stuff on there.But then you put it through that red line you said, yeah, but Ralph, it's not going to work because of this and it's not going to work with this. But you might have had a brilliant idea in the green zone, but what it do, it narrowed the focus a little bit.It may give you fewer options to make better decisions. And finally, here's another one, Heather, I'm going to encourage you to do document decisions so you can reuse past clarity.A lot of small business owners don't get this. When you go through a tough situation, like an analysis or something, you gotta make a tough decision. Write those things down.Why did you make this decision? I love journals for small business people. Journal what happened today. Journal the task you had. Journal the struggles you had.Journal the problems that you ran into. And then journal why, how you solved it, what you thought through, what did you have to do? Because you can use that for two things.Number one thing, it's great to give you clarity about how you fixed it, but it's also a way to build up your self esteem. Because, Heather, one of the things he said is, I feel like I'm not making the right decisions.Well, if you write them down and you write down why you did it, sort of you Know your decision about why you got like a decision tree, for lack of a better way of saying it, you go back and say, well, Ralph, I made this decision because it's going to make you feel better about your decisions. I don't know about you, but as a business owner, have you ever felt like your brain was full before the day even started?What we're talking about there is overload. We're talking about burnout. And I want to say this clearly. You don't have to do business alone. Every owner hits walls.If you're a small business owner and you haven't hit a wall, it's just a matter of time. It's going to happen. Every owner is going to face burnout and every owner needs boundaries. Those are sure things.You're going to hit walls, you're going to face burnout, and you've got to have boundaries.But the ones who grow, the ones who build something that lasts, they surround themselves with people who help them think clearer, people who help them plan smarter, and people who help them stay accountable. So if tonight's episode has hit home for you, I want to invite you to join a community. I talked about this earlier. I created this.It's called a Patreon community. Basically, it's a place where you can go. It doesn't cost you a dime.You can go and share your experiences, go interact with other small business owners. You get to it by grit, by going to gritandgrowthbusiness.com join again. That's gritandgrowthbusiness.com join. It's not complicated.You go right to that website, it'll take you right to it. You enter your name and email address. I'm not going to try to sell you anything. All the things are going to be in there. Every week.You're going to get our weekly action sheet. What we talked about on this show, how you put those things into practice.It's a place where you can talk about things that are going on in your business. A private community discussion. We're going to do some live Q and A as this thing expands.I'm going to have some behind the scene resource, some templates, some things that you can use and support from other small business owners that are fighting the same battles you're fighting. Because guess what?All the things we talked about on tonight's show, if I could see a show of hands, how many people have been through one or all those things, I guarantee everybody have their hands up. Because I can say that about me. I went through all of those. But you don't have to do that alone.And if you're at the point where you need some personalized one on one coaching, I'd be happy to work with you. You can do that through that group as well. Listen, no pressure, just an invitation. I want to help you grow together.All right, well, let's wrap up tonight and let's do a bit of a recap. Tonight we talked about burnout. We talked about those three boundaries that protect your life.We talked about time without access, clear work modes and a weekly what matter system. So I'm going to encourage you right now, lean into that if you want to break this burnout cycle.So many small business people are at this point, especially this time of year, this is a big time of year, to feel that burnout. Set aside that time without access. You know, clearly define those work modes.Put that, that mood hat on, that admin hat or that CEO hat or that sales hat and really lean into it this week. That what matters most system. You're going to find it to be really helpful. And of course, we also covered our listener questions.We talked about reducing that 80 hour work week, empowering your team, setting communications boundaries, taking real time off. We told you you can do that. You just have to put a plan in place and making decisions with less overwhelm.But all of those things, all those questions pointed back to one truth. You don't win in business by doing more. You win by doing what matters. I want to say that again because I need you to hear this tonight.If you don't hear anything else I've said tonight, this is the golden thing here. You don't win in business by doing more. You win by doing what matters. So choose to do what matters. Build the systems.And if you want tools, support and coaching to help you live out these lessons again, go to grit and growth business.com join again. That's gritngrowthbusiness.com join. So, friends, this is another great show. I want to thank everybody for joining us live.Remember this grit builds growth. Growth builds freedom. So thank you for joining me this evening. God bless you and I'll see you again next week on the show.