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Running a business is not easy, especially if you are trying to raise a family at the same time. Both responsibilities require a lot of time, attention, and sacrifice. But you can do both. Here are a few ways to help you balance raising a family well while keeping your business successful!

Set Time for Both 

Creating time for your family should be intentional. Take whatever time you spend at the office and focus on business-related items. The moment you leave, however, be invested in your family. Make it a point to spend quality time with your family when at home by not answering office calls or replying to work emails. Of course, emergencies do occur and as a business owner, some emergencies can’t wait. But when you have handled a work emergency, take a break, and spend time with your family. As you are there for your children’s and your work’s monumental moments, you will find satisfaction and pride in the work and sacrifices you are making.

Make Sure Their Financial Future is Secure 

In the case that you or your business encounter hard times, it is important you have already made your family’s financial future secure. Keep business and personal expenses entirely separate. Pay off your debts early so it is never an issue for your family. Invest in a college savings account and a rainy-day fund for each of your children, and start a life insurance policy for yourself. Life insurance will take care of your loved ones in the event you pass away. Financially taking care of your family ensures their future is well-taken care of no matter what happens to you or your business.

Create Routines 

Children look to you and your example. When you are consistent with them, they can better depend on you, which establishes trust and a healthy relationship. Running a business takes a lot of time, but creating routines will help you be efficient in both areas. A consistent wake up and bedtime, as well as a strict start and end of your workday, will help you accomplish important tasks and give you energy to be present. Prioritize the right activities and let your children know that they are a key part of your success.

Parenting and running a business is difficult. You basically have two full-time jobs that are constantly demanding your attention. As you try to take time for both, make sure your family’s financial future is secure, and create routines you’ll find that raising a family while running a business is not impossible.

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Owning and running a business is a stressful endeavor to say the least—between balancing your profits and expenses, managing staff, marketing and more, you have more than enough on your plate that is sure to increase your stress levels significantly. Unfortunately, the higher your stress rates, the less effective you will perform! So, here are a few things that will help you reduce your stress levels and keep you functioning as well as you want (and need) to.

Keep to a Schedule

Your mind has a hard time organizing things that are chaotic, random, unstructured, and unplanned. Create a schedule for yourself! Allow your mind and your body a chance to get into a routine—this is proven to train your brain into self-prepping for certain functions. For example, you may find that after a while of waking up to an alarm, your body begins to naturally rouse around the time of your alarm. You can train your brain to increase in productivity and focus if you stick to a regimen of scheduled hours of certain tasks. Create a schedule that gives sufficient time for sleep, meal breaks, and sufficient (but not overbearing) number of hours dedicated to working.

Create a Healthy Work Environment

Surround yourself with good things and good people. An upbeat and positive work environment will foster energy as much as maintain it! Emphasize healthy avenues of communication between yourself and your employees or partners. Make the workplace a little more casual—whether through team building activities, dress code, office design, whatever—to promote a more relaxed feel to your everyday interactions. Provide positive feedback and encouragement, and create opportunities to highlight successes! “Positive energy” is a very real and very effective tool for motivating people to work hard and work at a high quality level.

Delegate to Employees

Don’t take on everything yourself! Truly, handling all the aspects of a business is an impossible task, and requires a wide variety of skill sets that you may not have enough experience in to complete well. Instead, trust your employees to handle things for you! You have hired people who (ideally) qualified for their position because of their impressive work experience and ability to handle difficult situations that you would not be able to handle yourself. Allow them to utilize their skills to benefit you, your company, their peers, and of course themselves. If handing over tasks is a bit uncomfortable or anxiety-inducing for you, divide up those big tasks into smaller elements that you feel comfortable entrusting to others, and allow yourself the means to keep a close eye on the task at hand!

Outsource Functions Outside Your Skillset

You can delegate outside of your employees as well. If you do not have an employee or company area that handles certain needed tasks, outsource! Rely on the professional grade help from trained people whose entire job is to perform those singular tasks with heightened focus (and therefore heightened success and reliability.) Furthermore, this leaves you to be able to handle the more business management-related tasks that you need as much time as possible for! For example, outsourcing IT services can help you focus on what you know how to do best at your business. From construction contracting to graphic design to computer systems and more, you can get quality trained help to take care of the intimidating parts of your business.

Plan Well (Including Consultation)

Just as planning your day well will help you personally, planning your business schedule as well will help your company remain diligent, productive, and driven. Create a timeline that gives you a little bit of a buffer around due dates and deadlines, so that any unexpected roadblocks can have some time to be overcome. Consider consulting with financial advisors, marketing managers, and more to determine the best timelines for your business’s moves and to help you balance them so that no one time period is overwhelmed by stressful deadlines. These advisors have insights into the ways your market and society may change so that you are always prepared to ride the waves right!

Simplify Goals

Another common stress-causing issue is the goals you set for your business. If there are too many or if they happen too rapidly and require too many smaller pieces to fall into place, you will likely find yourself in constant panic and incredibly discouraged over the slip ups and let downs that will happen. Trying to devote your attention to a hundred things is sure to decrease the quality and success rates of all of them. Conversely, devoting your attention to a handful of things at a time ensures a better awareness of their progress and a better hold on their completion. Try simplifying your goals: in number, in expectation, in time period.

Find Things About Your Work to Love

You wouldn’t be running a business if there weren’t elements of the job that you loved. Emphasize those parts! Dedicate a good amount of your time to doing the things that made you passionate about creating or running a business, in the first place. These tasks are another form of energy boosts for your brain. They will help you feel accomplished and remind you of your talents for doing what you do. Having a strong motivation for coming back to work every day will make it feel less like work and more like an exciting project that you will want to spend time on!

Do Things for You

Finally, do some things for you that will decrease your overall stress! Take time to enjoy a hobby, relax, socialize with good people… anything that rejuvenates and energizes you, or that gives you something to look forward to. Take a step back, take a deep breath, and give yourself a break! Self-care is actually an essential part of improving self-function. You’ll be doing yourself, your employees, and your business a favor by making sure you take care of yourself.

Running your business is sure to come with some anxieties or stresses over the desired success. However, implementing some of these strategies into your own life or the management of your business is sure to relieve a significant amount of that detrimental stress, and allow you to perform your best (and therefore allow your business to perform well, too!)

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Ideally, your business’s profits start off high and only get higher. Realistically, making your business profitable is a fight that may feel exhausting and frustrating at times! While there is no easy way out of that struggle, there are a few strategies that are particularly helpful at helping your business become profitable, faster.

Reduce Debt

The first and biggest strategy is to reduce your debt. Put a halt to the things that are slowly leaking your income right out the back door! Make it a priority to pay off debts quickly. You have a variety of options that can help you get the money needed to reduce your debts—for example, you might consider refinancing or renegotiating your loans with current lenders to better fit your payoff capabilities. You can also find ways to consolidate and cut waste from your company, or look into grants that can alleviate some of your financial burdens. Do whatever is wisest for you to lift some of the weight that comes with harmful and draining debts in your business!

Continuous Improvement

Next, implement a business plan that you are confident will get you the continuous improvement that you need for a constant income. Do your best to never settle! Determination to push past hiccups and plateaus will make all the difference to maintaining a steady incline for your profits. Your initial or reevaluated business plan can present in a number of ways. If you are unsure where to start, consider a Gemba walk! This popular process for business evaluation involves walking step-by-step through the planning, processing, production and presentation of your goods or services, getting first-hand perspective and allowing time to ask questions of each step. A Gemba walk can help you identify areas of improvement in your business process. This is valuable information that can be quickly implemented into your business to ensure constant growth and development!

Target Marketing

Finally, get the most out of your customers and out of your marketing efforts by targeting the most effective audience possible. Target marketing involves a more direct, narrowed, tailored form of advertisement or consumer contact, with customers whose potential for successful transactions are better than a broad, blanket marketing plan. You get a more specific, successful group of consumers to your door, and those consumers get more of your commitment and attention! Rather than waste money on blanket strategies, spend on what will get you the best return on investment.

Slowing the flow of debt-payments, effectively planning for consistent improvement, and marketing specifically to consumers who will give back to you will get your business the profits it needs at a faster (more exciting and helpful) rate!

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Burnout from work has become increasingly common. Burnout is a step beyond ordinary work stress, it can make you feel physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted to the point where it is difficult to go to work or complete daily tasks. Beyond impacting your work life, burnout can also lead you to develop health problems.

Lack of Sleep

One effect of burnout is disruption to your sleep patterns. Work burnout can lead you to be more stressed about work, and that stress can make it hard to fall asleep. In addition, another symptom of burnout is that you begin working more to compensate for not feeling like you are doing enough at work. This can cause you to work late hours, making it harder to get all the sleep you need. This lack of sleep creates the vicious cycle of making it harder for you to do your job during the day because you are constantly tired.

Depression and Anxiety

Burnout can also cause depression and anxiety, and vice versa. Feeling burnt out at work can make you feel anxious, because you feel like you are not doing enough at work or you are not performing to your usual standard. Burnout can also lead to depression because it can cause you to lose interest in your work or feel like the work that you do no longer matters. Depression and anxiety are bad for your mental and physical health and can keep you from seeking the help you need. If you are looking for treatments for depression, TMS can treat depression without the side effects of medication.

Unhealthy Coping Mechanism

Because of all the negative consequences of burnout, you may begin to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms, instead of addressing the causes of burnout, or developing healthy coping strategies. In order to cope with burnout you may find yourself consuming more greasy or fried foods to feel better. You may also turn to other vices like excessive alcohol consumption or drug use. If you feel yourself falling into these patterns, you may want to consider seeking out healthier methods of dealing with your feelings.

Work burnout can be caused by a lot of different factors related to your work life. Know that if you are experiencing burnout from work, you are not alone. Burnout can have consequences on your health that you need to be aware of so you are able to address them.

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