Business Owners: How Do You Avoid Burnout?

Some great answers here and lots of helpful insights and tips from the previous replies, but to add on--systems are where it's at. You have to have PREDICTABLE behaviors that enable you, and your team to know: when A happens, B follows. Policies, SOPs, automations... all driven by a team (could even be ONE person!) that you trust and that you share your vision with. Making your behavior predictable means it can be duplicated and replicated at scale.

Having your team member(s) incentivized with profit sharing, prizes for successful quarters or big wins is also helpful to keep those team members with you long term.

Life is short. Not worth the burnout. Share your vision and you'll find the burden is less.

I completely agree. You just get better at recognizing the signs and then adjust or schedule some R & R!!!!

A few things helped me personally:

• building better systems so everything isn’t living in my head
  • delegating earlier instead of waiting until I’m overwhelmed
  • having actual office/planning time instead of reacting all day
  • forcing time for gym/family even during busy periods
  • shutting the company down twice a year for real vacations

We take 2 weeks around Christmas and another 2 weeks at the end of July. Non-negotiable. Everybody gets vacation pay and the company fully shuts down.

Seems counterintuitive at first in construction, but honestly I think it helps the team recharge and gives everyone something to look forward to during the busy season.

We are still working on this one. We recently implemented 'no work' dinners to try to shut if off at least for a little while. Having a small business it never stops. It is the center of everything - your schedule, your finances, your mental load, etc. Finding activities, even just for a couple of hours, that don't revolve around the business has proven to be beneficial.

You need to see what your energy is like throughout the day and plan you activities around it. You can get burned out quickly when you are swimming up stream and doing things you don't want to be doing them, when you don't want to do them. For me this meant:

• Putting the majority of quotes together early in the day. Before I get too fried and my eyes start to blur (I probably just need to get glasses tbh)
• Doing social media posts at the end of the day. I naturally want to doom scroll anyway
• Doing walk throughs in the middle of the day
• Don't plan meetings when everyone is going to be reaching out to me. This is hard because some coaching courses I've done meet during the witching hour but I just figure it out. Overall, I do meetings either very first thing or the end of the day. 

Pay attention to your energy during mornings, mid day, afternoon, evenings and plan the activities that require different types of focus during those times. 

Always remind your self family first. I tell my self this every evening leaving the shop. 

I don’t think most business owners fully avoid burnout I think we just get better at recognizing when we’re heading toward it.

For me, one of the biggest mindset shifts was realizing that constant availability was not the same thing as being a good owner.

In the early years, I handled EVERYTHING. And the business grew… but eventually it felt like the company owned me instead of the other way around.

What’s helped the most:

• building systems instead of relying on memory
• documenting SOPs
• automating repetitive admin tasks
• empowering managers to make decisions
• accepting that not every problem needs ME personally
• creating actual boundaries with my phone

Some of the best operational decisions we’ve made came AFTER I stopped operating in constant stress mode. I also think burnout happens faster when owners feel guilty taking time away from the business. But long term, exhausted owners make worse decisions and create unstable companies.

Still working on balance honestly, but I’ve realized that a business that completely consumes my personal life isn’t really freedom either.

Something that has worked for me personally is to get everything that I'm thinking out of my head by either putting it in my reminders app or writing it down in a note or on a piece of paper, or just having a conversation with a friend who really wants to just sit there and listen and care.

I've heard that burnout happens when you're doing too much work with no end in sight, or I guess it feels like there's no end in sight. When you set measurable goals to reach that, it helps you focus in on one thing instead of everything all at once.

Also, for me, when I'm done working, I just tell myself, "The world can burn. I'm allowed to have some free time, and my business is not me; it's my business." I also would recommend scheduling out time off with your phone off, away from your business, allowing yourself to be fully present and in your life.