At Thrive Advice, we speak to many clients about how to stay motivated in your business. When running an SME it can be exhausting and we quite often catch people falling out of love with their small business. Whilst we understand how this can happen we want you to avoid this at all costs and we coach many of our clients back to a state of business well-being. Running a successful small business can be challenging, yes, but also rewarding.

What is happening when you fall out of love with your business…..

Identifying what is going on when you fall out of love with your business is key to curtailing the spiral downwards. Mostly, we see a state of burnout as the key driver to the decline. This is due to the many hours worked, challenging day-to-day tasks, human resource issues, client customer demands, change in consumer behaviour etc.

Unfortunately, we see the above burdens taking over people in their business and they become reactionary business owners, going from the visionary entrepreneur to an exhausted shell putting out spot fire after spot fire. It becomes very difficult to stay motivated in your business.

What is going on here? Well, it can be many things….but here are a few:

• The business owner is no longer in control of their business They have gone from the leader to the office junior continually running around doing other people’s job for them and becoming a slave to the reactionary behaviour that comes with being out of control.
• The owner has to do more. This requires more hours to keep up, they don’t take the time to stop and analyse what is happening and get caught in the trap of trying to work their way out of this state.
• As a business grows there comes the need to hire the right people for the job. The people that the business started with, may not be equipped to handle where the business is now and where it is going.
• As a business grows, more times than not, the business owner fails to document the processes that are repeatable and scalable in their business. This makes growth hard.
• The entrepreneur loses sight of their mission, vision, values in business and simply become jaded.

How do we fix this….how do we motivate?

At Thrive Advice we help our client take stock of where they are, review their pain points and begin fixing those problem areas. This all helps build momentum and make you more inclined to be motivated in your business. Here are some tools we’ve used in our clients’ businesses just in the past 12 months:

• Encourage the business owner to holiday once a quarter, it doesn’t have to necessarily mean to lay on a beach, but what we find is that once the entrepreneur has broken away from their business they begin to formulate their own ideas on how they could run their business better.
• Formulate a one-page business plan with our clients delivering a mission statement, vision and values, this becomes a platform for the business to reset, work out where they’re headed, and what they need to do to get there, and why on earth they should bother.
• Draw up an organisational chart, this allows the business to visually decide if they have the right people in the right places.
• We encourage all our clients to allocate some time in their schedule to think about their business, use this time to reflect, measure success, and implement positive change. Introduce a new service, expand your operation, or introduce a new product, do something that challenges you and makes things fun again.
• Document your processes, this is a lifesaver, all of a sudden what is stored in peoples heads, is now on paper or recorded using programs such as Loom. This really does make it easier to delegate and become scalable.
• Learn how to delegate. As the business owner, your time is valuable and scarce. Don’t waste your time doing things you don’t need to be doing. Hire people to do these tasks if you must. Delegation is quite often the hardest thing to learn, but once you master it, the sky is the limit. Keep in mind that delegation is not dumping, its more like coaching.
• Take some time to have fun, and celebrate the wins.

Why do we do this….

We love all things business and believe that business can be a rewarding and interesting adventure into self-actualisation and wealth creation.

Why we do this is because of our clients, we love to give them back their own ‘why’ and help them spring into the future of their business.