E21 Being Prepared For the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster with Jessica Maine

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Do you feel like your days are busy but that you aren’t actually doing anything meaningful? If you do, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs hit burnout because they are too busy, wearing too many hats and not properly creating space in their day. When you spend every day exhausted, feeling like you are going non-stop and then look back and feel like you have nothing to show for all of that effort, it can be really hard to convince yourself to keep going. 

In Episode 21 of The Lean Out Your Business Podcast, Crista Grasso sits down with Jessica Maine, an advocate for individuality, expression and social consciousness as well as an Accountability Coach inside the Simplify to Scale Business Accelerator, a 6-month program designed to help business owners lean out in order to level up their business. Together they discuss practical ways to avoid burnout, how to grow efficiently (both professionally and personally) and what it looks like to hold yourself and others accountable within your business. 

In this episode, we dive into:

• Avoiding burnout
• How to grow efficiently
• Stop trying to look like everyone else
• Four critical components for business success
• The importance of being mindful of what’s going on in the world today

Avoiding Burnout

According to Jessica, when you get to burnout there is a lot of chaos going on in your head; your to-do list is probably pages long, you are staring at a screen but not doing anything productive, you are having a hard time knowing where to channel your energy to get the most momentum, you feel like you are always working but aren’t producing the desired results, you are on a roller coaster but instead of being safely strapped in you are hanging on for dear life.

When Jessica’s clients feel like this the first thing she has them do is document their entire day. If you’re feeling like you are headed towards burnout Jessica recommends that you write down everything that you do in a day from start to finish. This allows a few things to happen:

1. You become an objective observer of your life rather than emotional by-product

2. You can start to see where you are not being efficient with your time

3. You can more clearly see the tasks you are doing, that you should not be doing

Once you have an objective view into your life, you can start organizing your to-do list and your thoughts and get busy planning your growth.

Growing Efficiently

Once you have compiled the data on how you spend your time you can start to create capacity (think removing the distractions that do not serve you and hiring team members to take on the tasks that you do not have time for and that are not in your zone of genius) and from that space you can start to determine your road to growth. For Jessica, the first question she asks her clients is, “what does growth look like to you?”

It is so important that as you look to grow your business you do so by getting clear on what matters most to you, what success looks like to you. Jessica finds that many business owners get into trouble because they start deciding what they want their growth to look like by comparing their current circumstance to what they believe their competitors’ circumstances are.

The main problem with basing your goals on what your competition looks like is that you have no idea what is going on internally with your competitor. You do not know how much capitol they started out with, you do not know what their internal culture is like, etc. So you might be making very unrealistic goals for yourself and in turn loosing up your safety harness on the entrepreneurial roller coaster. The second problem with trying to look like everyone else, is that your brand identity depends on you being unique. Rather than trying to look like everyone else you should be finding the answers to these questions:

- What sets your brand apart?

- What is working for you?

- What makes your company unique?

- What do you do well?

- What do you want to be known for?

Outside of keeping your eyes on your own growth, the second most important thing to remember when planning your growth strategy is to make sure you are making your goals measurable. If your goal is to double current sales, then we need to know what you sold each month of the last quarter; if your goal is to have more time with your family then we need to know how much time you are currently spending with your family, what tasks we need to relieve you of and how much it is going to cost to hire your “replacement.”

Make your goals measurable, make them practical, make them unique to your company and celebrate the small wins if you want to avoid burnout.

Four Critical Components to Business Success

In her work, Jessica has noticed four critical components to business success. They include:

1. Building authentic, professional relationships

2. Accountability

3. Empowerment

4. Education

Although all four are equally important in today’s conversation Crista and Jessica take a deeper look at what it means to be an effective accountability coach.

For Jessica, it comes down to helping clients get really clear on where they are now, where they want to be and then discovering where the disconnect is; it’s about listening, because according to Jessica, more often than not people already know the answers, they just need to be asked the right questions.

It’s also about being there to remind people why they got on the roller coaster in the first place. “When we originally spoke this is why you said you started, is that still true, has anything changed? Let me help you remember what you are here for.”

Being an entrepreneur can have lots of ups, downs and unexpected turns. It is a more enjoyable ride if you do not go it alone. Make sure you are creating space for yourself, hire team members who can help you scale and get a coach who can help you get to where you want to go.