© 2024 Melanie White
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I want to start today’s episode with a question for you – how resilient is your business?
Are you looking after your business as well as you’re looking after yourself?
As a specialist in resilience building and planning, I have come up with a concept – business self-care – that will help you to develop and manage your business in a more proactive and organised way so that you can stay on top of things and build resilience in your business to help you better withstand the storms.
In a general sense, self-care refers to activities that you do to enhance your physical, mental and emotional wellbeing so that you have the resilience to maintain your energy and manage stress well.
In other words, if you want to be physically and mentally fit and resilient, then you need to have regular habits and rituals in place to first achieve and then maintain those states.
Exactly the same goes for your business!
Business self-care is a concept that I developed to describe the set of activities that you do to enhance the running of your business so that you are actively taking better care of your business, experiencing less stress and have more clarity, certainty and a sense of organisation around what you are doing each week.
If you want to grow and manage your business in a way that feels easy, organised and generates regular income – then you need to adopt a few regular business habits and rituals.
Here are my top four business self-care practices that every business needs.
For you as a person, there are certain things you do every week to build resilience – the ability to bounce back from stress. These include things like exercise, eating well, getting a good night’s sleep, journaling, creative hobbies, social contact and being in nature.
There are also parts of your business that need attention every week so it can bounce back from setbacks and not succumb to pressure.
What are business weekly self-care tasks?
They’re generally tasks related to financial health, service quality and generating new income.
While every business is unique, I’d suggest that most businesses can be resilient by:
All of these tasks might equal around one day’s worth of time per week, either in one block of time or in not-negotiable time slots.
Scheduling them into not-negotiable slots makes them happen, and will keep your business running smoothly.
These are the things that keep the wheels turning and to stay on course toward your goals.
For you personally, checking in with yourself helps you to identify what’s working well and which areas of your life need more attention, or help.
The same goes for business.
It’s easy to get busy with doing the work, but you also need to take time to review how things are going, what’s working, and what’s not.
One very good reason for this is to increase your efficiency – to do more productive work in less time and/or with less effort.
Your business review highlights what’s working in your business, and what’s not. It might help you to identify where you are losing money, wasting time, or misguided effort.
In one example, I had a client who spent around 10 hours per month promoting products in her business, but they made up only 1% of her business!
As soon she saw that, she realised that those 10 hours could be better spent – and, she defined an easier way to sell more products that took far less time.
Another example is marketing.
When was the last time you looked at how many people responded to your offers, or joined your mailing list, or joined your group?
If you don’t know those things, then you have no way of measuring the effectiveness of your marketing. You’re flying blind.
Knowing and tracking a few numbers and doing a simple monthly review will help you work out what’s working and what’s not – so you can build more resilience into your business.
Support and check-ins are so important for us as individuals to maintain health and well-being.
I go to my dentist regularly, get checkups with the doctor, see a skin therapist, and do other things to help me get an external perspective on my state of health and resilience.
I hire coaches to coach me through the year in different areas to help me recommit to my health habits or motivators.
When life is busy, it’s easy to forget to check in and ensure things are on track, and that you are attending to any blind spots, and anticipating challenges so you can respond appropriately.
The same goes for your business.
Having outside eyes on your business, or helping you recognise what’s working, and trends over time and identify which areas of your business need attention, is the best way to maintain the health and well-being of your business.
If you know anything about how the human body works, you know that it’s only by changing things up regularly that you get progression and growth.
It’s only by changing your exercise routine that you maintain fitness and strength.
It’s only by learning new things that you grow your knowledge and mental capacity.
Without changing things up and committing to growth, you risk becoming stagnant and bored.
The same thing goes with business.
You can keep doing the same thing day in, and day out, but it may not help you to keep abreast of changes in technology, client sentiments, trends, disruptors and industry changes.
Professional development and business training are essential parts of business self-care and resilience.
When you stay on top of the changes that affect your business, and upskill to address those changes, you’ll more easily pivot and adapt, keep the ship sailing on course, and roll with the changes with ease.
The pandemic is a great example. We all had to learn how to pivot into online service delivery and for some people, that means learning new skills like using online conferencing platforms, changing to an online payment system, and finding new ways to market their business.
Being responsive and proactive means you can prepare yourself to adapt and maintain your clients and your business income.
Today I talked about self-care essentials for business, which I consider to be:
Understanding who you are and what you need will allow your business to thrive! If you’re truly ready to break old habits and get out of the rut I encourage you to check out the Habitology membership.
Learn more here:
© 2024 Melanie White