It happens to business owners at some point along the way, particularly home-based business owners whose work is more closely inner twined and harder to separate from personal and family life. “It” is that funny little thing called “burnout.” Ironically, it seems to arrive at a time when the business is in a stage of comfortable maturity – plenty of satisfied customers, phones ringing regularly and more work than you could have ever imagined with profits to match. Burnout never seems to happen while a business is growing – or even failing. Burnout comes when things are going well and it would seem that you should be enjoying the fruits of your success and achievements.

You may recognize some of the symptoms of burnout. In the early days of business, you couldn’t wait for the phone to ring. Now, you grow annoyed and resentful every time it does – especially if your home business phone also rings in your living room so that you don’t miss a call while you’re giving the dog a bath. You used to take pride in having a schedule that was so jam packed with appointments that you had to pencil in time to use the restroom each day. Now, you just want to hit the “delete” button for the schedule on the computer and take an extended vacation – permanently. You may have heard yourself say that your customers are running you instead of you running a business. That’s a clue you’ve turned a corner into full-blown burnout.

So what happened to get you from the mountaintop of successful business ownership all the way to the valley of burnout? Some things may be obvious – being so busy building your business that you have not taken time to rest, recreate and take care of your personal, emotional, spiritual and relational needs. Those things are easy to identify and fix by changing your priorities, but there is a not-so-obvious reason why business owners experience burnout. The reason is because the thrill is gone.

This happened to us after several years in business. Everything was finally going our way after years of sacrifice and hard work. Customers were happy, profits were high, and phones were ringing – too much, it seemed. We made the changes necessary to give ourselves more time to relax and enjoy the successes in our lives, but even those changes didn’t seem to pull us out of burnout.

There came a point where we had to sit down and really take a hard look at things. Why had we lost the thrill of owning a business? How could we get it back? Here are the steps that we took that may enable you to pull out of burnout.

Get back to the original purpose of why it is you started into business. Rediscover the joy that brought you to this decision and trace your path back to the point where things began to go off track. For us, our decision to go into business was because we enjoyed serving people – which is why we chose a service-oriented business. Where we had gotten off the path is that we began to allow our customers to dictate our policies, determine our schedules and had inadvertently trained them to expect us to be at their beck and call without having set any boundaries. When you work from home, this is one of the dangers of not being able to separate business from home life – the lines tend to get blurred especially if customers know you can hear the phone ring in your bedroom after hours (or worse yet, pull up in your driveway to conduct business while you’re mulching the yard on a weekend because you didn’t answer the phone). “Serving” was no longer something we did from the heart – it was something that was demanded of us and began to feel more like slavery. It wasn’t the customers’ fault – we allowed it to happen.

In the initial days of starting into business, it is normal for new business owners to do whatever it takes to gain a new customer. In the beginning, there is often the time to cater individually to each customer, and since you work from home, it seems convenient to do so. Once a business begins to grow, if you continue with that mentality, you are going to find yourself being pulled and twisted in twenty different directions by the increased number of demands on your time and attention. You start to feel taken advantage of rather than priding yourself on prompt service and courtesy. And very soon, you guessed it – burnout.

Once we realized that burnout had taken place, we began to re-establish firm boundaries between home and business. Instead of feeling pressured or forced to capitulate out of fear of losing customers – a seed of unnecessary worry that is often planted in the first years of business – we learned to relax and have confidence that our customers weren’t going anywhere just because we needed to make some necessary changes. The key to doing this successfully was to establish a plan, communicate it effectively to the customers – and stick to the changes when customers tempted us to bend the rules.

Burnout, as it turned out, was a clue that we were going through growing pains and attempting to hold onto practices and habits that served us well in the infancy of our business – but would suffocate us if we refused to recognize that we, and our company, were evolving.

If you find yourself experiencing burnout, go back to the place in time where joy existed. Identify what it is that stole your joy. Make the changes necessary to fix this, especially when it comes to setting boundaries where home and business meet, and you’ll soon discover that the thrill is back.

Last 5 posts by Susan Williams

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