Prof Mark here,
If you are like most businesses owners, you’ve experienced the feeling of being overwhelmed in your business at one time or another. Maybe you experience this feeling regularly and for good reasons. You might feel weighed down with what feels like hundreds of things pulling at you at one time. You’ve got marketing going, production to oversee, calls to return, employees that need your advice. It’s never ending right? How do you possibly handle it all?
Most of the small business owners that I talk to, coach and advise, keep almost all of these things in their head. I ask them where their business plan is. They say it’s in their head. I ask where their employee training manual is. They say it’s in their head. About the only thing that’s written down is their calendar of client appointments. Even a lot of their day to day to-dos are in their head. That’s a lot of stuff in your head, and even more importantly, that’s a lot of stuff that is liable to be forgotten.
Today, I want to give you one practical and powerful way I’ve found to help in slowly combat this feeling of being overwhelmed—write it all down!
Most business owners feel overwhelmed because they run most of their business out of their heads. Start writing these different tasks down and you will start lessening this feeling of being overwhelmed. Start taking a little time each day to document your business processes and specifically what you’re working on or doing. Make a list today of the processes that you haven’t recorded. Cover marketing, production, training, accounting, etc.
The next step is to take one of these areas and document it in full detail this week and in the following weeks fully document the other areas of your business. Within a fairly short period of time, you should have at least the basics of marketing procedures, production procedures, client follow up procedures, and employee training procedures in place. In other words, you’ve now got business processes and written plans that you can rely on and don’t have to think about. This is one great practical way to grow your business and begin lessening the feeling of being overwhelmed.
Till next time,
Prof Mark