It’s all there in that first flush of excitement – the moment you fall in love with your business, overflowing with new ideas, passion for what you do and unbridled enthusiasm. This precious feeling is what spurs many entrepreneurs on to success. However, it’s equally common to lose that spark. As day-to-day processes, admin busywork and the steep learning curve of striking out on your own take over, it’s very common to lose sight of what made you love your business in the first place. So, if you’ve lost that loving feeling, what can you do to reignite the spark and fall back in love with what you do?
Focus On Streamlining Backend Process
When you’re first starting out and you’re unlikely to have much support as you have few or no employees, you’ll necessarily be dedicating a lot of your time to business admin, and that can drag you down and take away from your original purpose and what you truly love doing. So spend time seeking out software solutions that can streamline these support functions, and minimize the time you have to dedicate to them. Services such as payroll.services, invoicing and recruitment can all be made far less labor intensive with the correct tools. Most solutions are usually relative low-cost, allow you to work on the go from any location, and will free up one of your most valuable assets -you!- to get back to driving new business.
Get Networking
One of the best ways to reconnect with your love of what you do is to tell other people. Seek out like-minded fellow business owners at local networking events, and allow their passion to rekindle your own. Enthusiasm and energy are contagious qualities after all. You may also find some new opportunities, or collaborative possibilities, that excite you again and get your brain working in new directions.
Revisit Your Business Plan
When you feel stuck in a rut, take the opportunity to revisit your initial business plan. Within that document will be multiple reasons that you saw your original business idea succeeding – reasons which are compelling enough to have convinced multiple stakeholders. It will take you back to a time of pure possibility and drive in your life. You could also choose to refresh the vision and overall strategy for your business. Keeping it dynamic and responsive to your own learnings, customer feedback and emerging market trends is critical for ongoing development.
Invest In Yourself
Without you, there would be no business, so you need to recognize your own value as a strategic asset. This could be a question of proactively working towards a better work life balance, or it could equally be recognizing a training need that you have and investing in that. Either way, use your gut instinct to understand which of these options will reinvigorate you.
Getting back in touch with your own needs shouldn’t always take a backseat to the other demands on your time – even physically adding them into your schedule if needs be to make sure they get addressed. If your own needs are not met, you can support anyone or anything else’s properly.