Five Tips For Greater Work-Life Balance For The Entrepreneur
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Let’s face it, as we get older, life only gets busier. If and when you get married your responsibilities increase because we’re no longer living just for ourselves. And when we start a business, the responsibilities increase even further. We now have to worry about our own financial success as well as those we employ.
Is there any wonder why we feel the need to work harder and harder? We are going to make sure to put in the hours necessary to succeed in business so that all our other responsibilities are taken care of.
The problem is that the more time we put into the business robs us of the personal time we need (whether you realize it or not) for our mental, emotional, and physical health. And for those of us that are married, time with our spouse and family that they deserve.
Is there a better way? Is it possible to have regular personal time with your most important relationships without sacrificing the success of the business? Is work-life balance possible?
The short answer is, yes. There is a better way to manage your life and business so you have better balance. Below are five tips that will get you on the right track. And since, statistically, 71% of business owners are married, we will pay special attention to making sure a better balance includes your home life.
And if you like these tips then you’ll definitely want to pick up your copy of our new book Tandem: The married entrepreneurs’ guide for greater work-life balance.
Define Work-Life Balance For The Entrepreneur
Work-life balance can be the unicorn that many want but seemingly impossible to achieve. That’s because you must first define what it is. You can’t achieve what you don’t define. So sit down and write out what work-life balance means to you. If you’re married, discuss this with your spouse.
Don't be surprised to find out that your spouse’s answer may be a little different from yours. And that’s ok. Don’t try to change their mind. Come up with a solution that makes sense to both of you.
For example, Kay Lee values quality time. So date nights, cooking together, vacations, and morning prayers are high priority for her. This also keeps us connected as husband and wife regardless of what is going on in life and business.
I enjoy all those things as well but I also enjoy golfing. That is time away from all the distractions to hang with the guys and enjoy the beauty of nature. Only interrupted by the occasional golf shank.
This list may be different from yours but the key for us is to prioritize those things on your calendars. These activities are life giving for us individually and as a couple so we make sure to prioritize those things. If we don’t, everything else in our life and business will become a priority by default.
2. Create A Life Vision For Marriage and Business
If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you have a vision for your business. Based upon that, most of your time and energy is focused on it. Then you try and fit the rest of your life in between. How about being more proactive and creating a vision for your life and planning out how your business is a part of it?
Without a comprehensive plan for your life, you become very reactive instead of proactive. You become quick to accept opportunities in your business and personal life without understanding how it will impact your current quality of life and ability to reach your long term goals.
For example, we don’t plan to retire (or at least that is what Kay Lee tells me) but we will scale back the amount of consulting work we do as we get older. As I shared earlier, we both love to travel so that will become a big part of the long term plan. But it doesn’t mean we can’t do some of that now.
Whenever we get a chance to travel for business, we are intentional about arriving a day or two early or stay later to enjoy trip. Why not? When I was working in my corporate job, I would get to travel to very nice locations for various meetings but never got to enjoy the location because I was too busy working. Now that we have our own business, we manage our schedule so we can enjoy the locations we travel to.
This is a small example of how we enjoy the future now.
3. Set Healthy Boundaries Between Business and Marriage
So you’ve defined what work-life balance means to you and your spouse, set a vision for the future, but how do you deal with the busyness of work impeding on your balance?
Boundaries.
You need to set healthy boundaries between the business and your marriage. I alluded to one way to set some boundaries is to put on the calendar your important personal time like regular date nights, monthly golf outings (for me), quarterly wine tastings, and yearly vacations.
But also, you should establish some boudaries around how often you check/respond to emails, text messages, phone calls, social media, and other business issues. Because if you don’t, you’ll do what you currently do. Checking and responding to those things when at home when you should be dedicating it to your spouse and family.
One of the things that Kay Lee told me she respected about me when we dated was I never checked my phone when we were having a meal or other personal time. I still honor this practice. In fact, once dinner starts, I don’t respond to business related emails, texts, and phone calls. And the kicker is I take a Sabbath from electronics on Saturday.
This break from business communication is refreshing and allows me to be present to my most important relationship. My wife.
You may be thinking, “But I NEED to answer my messages. It’s important.” Unless you’re a first responder, I’m confident that most messages do not warrant an immediate response. They can wait.
Who would you rather put on hold, a customer or your spouse? Choose the former and watch the relationship with your spouse go through the roof! And your customers will survive if you don’t respond til the next business day. They may even respect you more because you prioritize your family life.
4. Focus ON The Business
You only have so much time in the day and the work seems to pile up. How can you get everything done? Do you need better time management? No. You need to increase your time margin. - Get more done in less time by being more efficient.
So as the business owner, how do you become more efficient with your time? You need to focus “ON the business.”
Statistically, the average business owner spends 65% of their work on “IN the business” activities and only 35% on, “ON the business” acitivies. “IN the business” acivities are the busy work. Answering emails, taking care of customer service issues, invoicing, personnel issues, and just general “fire fighting.” Stuff that needs to get done but does not move the business forward.
“ON the business” activities are those tasks that actually move the business forward like vision planning, handling R&D, being the chief rainmaker, closing big deals, or mentoring your leaders.
For me, focusing on the consulting work, creating content (like this article), and business strategy is the best use of time. It moves the business forward and also gives me life. If you’ve heard of the book “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks, he refers to this as the “Genius Zone.” When you’re doing work that you’re excellent at but also life giving, you’re in that sweet spot.
If you flip the ratio to 65% of your time focused on “ON the business” activities, think about how productive you would be? Your business would move forward in less time.
Click here to learn more on how to devote 65% of your time on “ON the business” activities.
5. Increase Profit Margins
There are three ways to increase profit margins
Combination of both
Case study, sell on value, be more efficient
In most cases, it’s the combination of both raising prices and reducing costs that will get your profit margins to where it should be.
Most likely, your business could stand a price increase of some degree. How do I know? Let’s first consider a few things:
The average rate of inflation is 2.6%*/year
The inflation rate in 2022 hit 9.1%*
A healthy net profit margin is 10-15%
*The federal inflation rate reported does not account for fuel and food cost. Fuel and food prices hit inflation highs of 41.6% and 11.2% in 2022.
Based on this information, answer these questions:
How consistently have you raised prices year over year?
How much did you raise prices in 2022?
What is your net profit margin (after paying all expenses, including yourself)?
If you’re like most, you are inconsistent at best when it comes to raising prices year over year. Hopefully, you’ll start to realize that by not keeping up with inflation, you’re losing money. Maybe that’s the reason you’re working harder and harder without seeing profits rising like you expect.
Whether you need to raise your prices or not, another area to assess is reducing costs. This is not about slashing expenses though. It’s about being more efficient.
Think about this. What would it mean if you could provide your services faster (like an accountant filing an additonal tax return/day) while charging the same price, increase the number of leads from your website, sell and additional unit/transaction, or increasing your email open rates?
Your results would increase and your cost per sale would decrease. Of course you would need to make some adjustments to your processes and marketing, but it won’t require more effort.
If you want to go deeper on this topic, read “4 Tips To Grow Your Business For Greater Freedom.”
Want to learn how to raise your prices while attracting the right customers? Click here and access the Priced For Profit online course.
Or you can listen to our podcast episode Guaranteed Marketing Strategy to Increase Profits.
Summary
Hopefully you can see by now that defining what work-life balance means to you and your spouse and putting in the proper boundaries, you can immediately increase your quality of life and relationships.
When you include addressing the areas of your business that are costing you time and money, you’ll soon find that you won’t have to work as hard to earn more profit.
All this together will help you create greater work-life balance and you’ll have the freedom you desired when you first started the business.
Do you have questions? Feel free to book a complimentary discovery call to pick our brain. We’d be happy to help you win in marriage and business.
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