Owning a small business poses its own set of challenges. There is the pressure to scale up, employees to manage, sales to monitor, debts to pay among many other tasks to handle in a day. All these can be overwhelming and stressful, especially because they squarely fall on your shoulders. That’s why small business management tips are strongly related to learning how to manage and navigate through these small business owner stresses.
Stress can be detrimental to your business and your health as well. It becomes difficult to make business decisions when you are stressed. Stress can also ruin your day and limit your ability to work effectively and productively. If not managed properly and regularly, everyday business stress can become chronic and lead to life-threatening Illnesses.
That is why it is important to quickly take action whenever stress starts to kick in. If you want your business to thrive, it is important that you follow these 6 business tips on stress management for business owners.
Take a break
Sometimes working on an involved task can have you going back and forth without having anything done. The pressure to get it out of the way can be a huge stress trigger. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by a task or situation, the best course of action is to take this business tip for your small business owner’s stress and take a break. Stepping away for a few minutes will help clear your mind and re-energize. You are most likely to find a new focus that will simplify the task when your mind is clear.
Move to plan B
Most business tasks have multiple ways of handling them. A useful small business owner tip is knowing which way of handling a task is the most time and cost-efficient, and productive for your business specifically. If the method you are using is not yielding results and stressing you out, why not move to plan B. For instance, if you are trying to hire or manage international employees on your own, opting to utilize the services of a global PEO is a worthy alternative. The organization takes care of hiring and managing their HR needs. This business tip for small business owners like you will help eliminate the stress of managing your foreign workforce and understanding the foreign labor and business laws specific to your country of business expansion. If you currently don’t have the resources, it’s a vital small business owner tip that you still have alternative approaches to effectively tackle challenging tasks.
Switch to a simpler task
When you reach a dead-end with a task, continuing to pursue it will only lead to more stress. The most opportune business tip for a small business owner such as yourself would definitely be to take a break from it. Taking breaks always helps, but with a long list of tasks to complete, taking a break could be impossible. In such a situation, setting that particular task aside and picking a new one can really help. Switch your focus to another simpler task to give your mind a little bit of rest. As you accomplish several simpler tasks, so will your confidence level be going up. After being done with multiple simple tasks, finally going back to that dreadful task will not be that dreadful after all. Your mind is no longer exhausted by trying to solve the same problem, and it will now be much easier to find a solution, and you are much more likely to look at the problem from a completely different angle.
This different angle is really important for the efficient and productive completion of a task. In return, this small business management tip will successfully help you alleviate the stress associated with doing business, and preserve substantial amounts of energy to focus on the factors that actually serve the purpose of business growth and success, such as leads and sales increase, optimized profits and revenues, and definitely employee engagement enhancement.
Take a power nap
Being a small business owner often means that you have to take care of statistical and logistical tasks that you would not be otherwise taking care of if you were a well scaled-up enterprise. As a result, small business demands can easily have you working late into the night, depriving you of the much-needed sleep. You know too well that staying alert the following day gets a little harder. If you didn’t, take this small business owner tip and check yourself on those toxic workaholic tendencies, and make sure you sleep for sufficient hours. Working late into the night tired means that you have already exhausted your productivity drive, and you are much more likely to make minor mistakes that you could have effortlessly done if you’re all energized the next morning.
Accomplishing tasks in that state becomes inefficient, irritable, and even impossible, which can trigger staggering amounts of stress, unmanageable if you’re undeniably overworked. However, that is not to say that the situation is irredeemable. If you’re facing a tight deadline and sleeping until the next day is out of the question, you can definitely take a 10-20 minutes nap. A short nap will give you the opportunity to switch off your mind, and directly address the source of stress by not letting it escalate and ultimately take over you.
This business tip for small business owners is all you need to increase your alertness after you wake up. It is also a good way to re-energize and refuel your creativity drive.
Hydrate
When you are stressed, your adrenal glands are weakened, which causes dehydration. On the other hand, dehydration causes lethargy, which is generally making your energy levels go down, further enabling you to manage your stress. That is the reason why it is important to always ensure that your body is well hydrated. The business tip for small business owners to swear by is to always stay hydrated. Thus, the next time you are feeling stressed, probably all you need is to drink up and make sure that you always have sufficient amounts of liquids available when you feel inhibiting levels of stress and lethargy. You may be tempted to reach out for coffee in such situations, but if you’re already stressed, caffeine will for sure make you more hyperactive, but not due to increased levels of energy, but even more stress and anxiety instead. Thus, if you’re dehydrated, keep this small business owner tip in mind and drink water, and only water. Water is the ideal beverage to hydrate your body.
Find an alternative working space
Sometimes working in the same place for a long time could be causing you stress. For instance, when you are working in your office, you are more conscious of the things that you have to accomplish since it is all on your table. Furthermore, there might be things that are distracting you, that you have become accustomed to, but that are still compromising your productivity and freshness of thought for effective problem solving, and task completion. In this scenario, working in the same environment is causing you stress, and you don’t even know it. Take this small business owner tip and try finding an alternative place to work. You can opt to change the location to your home office. Alternatively, work at a coworking space near you. Just changing the scenery is enough to give your mind a new focus as well as reenergize your body.
Besides, with other professionals working in such spaces, you have more chances to network. You never know, you can as well find alternative solutions to your challenges among the new professionals you meet. Furthermore, working in a space with focused and efficient people, creates this general aura of productivity that is contagious and also inspires you to be more productive and focus on the tasks at hand, rather than the distractions. This business tip for small business owners has been proven to help entrepreneurs avoid distractions that trigger stress and compromise overall productivity.
Conclusion
For a small business owner, stress triggers can be everywhere but so are small business management tips. Keep your mind open to such situations, it becomes much easier to fight stress when you are aware that it is part of owning and running a business. The trick is to not dwell on the stressors for a long period of time. Furthermore, although as a small business owner you might not have many employees to distribute the workload to, it is still important that you build a social support system that either offers moral or professional support. On the other hand, you can always leverage these small business management tips by actively keeping alert of your stressors, and staying motivated to adequately address them.
