Overworked and Overwhelmed In Business? How To Prevent Burnout

Today, I’m going to give you a surprising revelation: you’re probably doing too much work in your business right now.

Don’t Take As Long As I Did Before You Notice This

Now, I know this is probably the exact opposite of what everyone was expecting to hear from me of all people. Aren’t I supposed to be “Mr. Daily Business Hustle” and always pushing you further for more and more implementation and work ethic?

Well, of course, but it’s not that simple. If you’re just beginning, then beyond a shadow of a doubt you need to work your face off. BUT if your business is already at six-figures and above… I’ll bet that you’re doing too much work because this was exactly what was going on with me recently.

The basic scenario was this: I was running my business for a year before I really hired a team of people. It was already at six-figures, I could afford a nicer lifestyle, and things were good, but I spent an entire YEAR before I really started hiring people to help me out.

If You’re Overworked and Overwhelmed, Your Brain Slows Down

I quickly realized that with all the things I was doing, I could simply write them down in an organized fashion (or in a structured video) and teach them to someone else. These same processes could be reproduced by an employee, thus freeing up time for me to perform more pressing duties.

In fact, as I began organizing my processes into a document, I found you could likely write a book of over 100 pages of all the processes I was doing just as one man. This is simply too much.

What ends up happening is that all of your mental “RAM” – practically every thought in your brain and fiber in your bones – revolves around your business. At a certain point, this is just crazy. You should never go to that extent.

Don’t Build An Unsustainable Model

The reason behind this is that it’s just not scaleable business at the end of the day. Every single mentor I told about how much work I was doing and the processes that I was NOT outsourcing told me that this is pure insanity and it’s not scaleable. They told me I certainly couldn’t build a $100 million dollar business in that fashion.

Put another way, you’re simply wearing too many hats. The principle here is this: you should focus on doing what generates the most revenue in your business. Not every single process.

When you find out what generates the most revenue, give away as many extracurricular processes as you can to other people.

The trick behind doing this is that you have to make the explanations and trainings so simple that ANY one can follow them. Almost anyone… even a slightly qualified person. You don’t need to hire specialized people on high salaries who could leave the company and make them hard to replace.

Note: I know this doesn’t apply to every single business or process, but you’d be surprised about how many processes you’d likely be able to outsource without much hassle.

There Are Only A Few People You CAN’T Replace

If you accomplish these simplified processes and trainings with relatively replaceable employees, you’re well on your way. You don’t want to hire six-figure earners who can move on quickly.

The only exception to this mentality with sales people. You cannot have salespeople who do deals for you and don’t earn a lot of money. If you have salespeople, you need to have them make a lot of money because good salespeople can easily earn for themselves if need be, and they’ll leave.

Another good example of employees who earn a lot of money is developers, and they can be hard to replace as well. But generally speaking, other than salespeople and developers, you can outsource a lot of processes quite quickly and perform strongly in the marketplace.

The way I would do it is this: make your trainings for new employees into a 10-15 minute video (or series a videos) that you can give to a new hire that is simple and easy-to-learn. Then they can just take over the position, no problem, and you can move on.

Pay People By Their Results

An additional useful skill to develop is to pay people by results. Of course you could pay them by the hour, but imagine if their job is to get leads on the phone. This can be quite difficult even if the people were warm leads (in the sense that they opted-in), so your employee will need to chase these people down.

In order to give the employee extra motivation so the person isn’t just getting paid per hour and they actually want to get people on the phone, you can give them a small fee for every person they actually get on the phone that results in a sale.  Now, of course you’ll have to pay salespeople commission as well in particular (as an industry standard), which is an added incentive.

Your Clients Will Thank You For It

If you go out and look at the most successful businesses out there, you’ll find that a random store such as a street corner shop (that’s not a franchise) has processes that sort of randomized and not very consistent.

This poor delivery of service results in more refunds, higher expenses, and not a continuous level of client satisfaction. This is not right.

In other words, another reason to get all of this streamlined so you’re not overworked and overwhelmed is so that you can avoid situations like the street corner shop.

You want make your business consistent, scaleable, and able to deliver the same quality every time. That way once you go from 10 employees to 100 employees, it barely even matters because the processes are automated. You just add people in down the line.

You won’t have to wing it so much and it doesn’t become a randomized mess the way that so many smaller businesses seemed to get mired in. This can be the difference between a five-figure business and an eight-figure business, seriously.

Don’t Get Attached To The Particulars

The last point I’d like to make is never get too “attached” to any one process of your business.

I used to get so neurotic about talking to “every single client” the minute they joined, building this pie-in-the-sky notion of “connection” and I felt a need to speak to them immediately.

The larger my business grew, I quickly learned this is completely unsustainable if you’ve got hundreds of clients flowing in as you grow. Are you going to talk to every single sale that comes in? Likely not.

Don’t get attached to one process over another. Get attached to the healthy growth of your business over all other competing interests.

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Overall, your health and well-being are a key to your success in business, there’s no way around that. You need to automate processes to free up the time to actually become a better businessperson, and hopefully these keys can help get you there quicker than you ever thought possible.