Your Business Is Not Your Boss

Stop doing these 7 things in 2025 and watch your stress decrease while your team levels up.STOP Keeping everything in your head
If you do it because no one else knows how, document it. No one can help you if you don’t have an instruction set for them to follow. Capture it while you do it and you’ve given yourself the chance to delegate it next time.STOP Focusing on other people’s priorities
Other people’s priorities WILL absolutely need your attention, but they shouldn’t DRIVE your days. Ensure you have your own plan of work and address it first, without apology.STOP Bypassing processes and systems because you’re the boss
If there is an agreed upon way to do a task, do it the same way you tell others to do it. If you can’t, let someone else do it the right way. Few things are more alienating than an inconsistent leader who skirts their own standards.STOP Doing things others could do for you instead of the things only you can do
Your primary responsibility as a small business owner is to ensure the ongoing success of your enterprise. No one else can do this for you. Delegate the work others can accomplish so you can direct your time, energy, and focus to the broader success of the business.STOP Refusing to ask for help
Leadership is not about demonstrating that you can (and will!) do everything in your power to function without the help of others. Leadership is inviting those on your team to rise to new challenges. This means intentionally asking for help – even when you don’t need it – so that someone else can grow.STOP Underestimating your team
Your team is likely capable of more than you think. Let them prove it to you. Give them more responsibility and see what happens. Show them a better way when they make mistakes, but don’t rob them of the opportunity to grow because you’re not sure if they are ready.STOP Letting your business boss you around
You are the boss of you. Not your employees, customers, or even your business. Stop spending your days and weeks putting out fires and focus on fire prevention.OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTION: What is one thing from this list that you could STOP doing THIS WEEK? How would you need to act differently to leave it behind? It’s time to swap stress and overwhelm for calm, focused, and effective days. My brand new Mastermind is launching soon and will help you to clarify your goals, identify your priorities, and invest your time, energy, and focus strategically so that you can accomplish more with less effort. Join the wait list today!

Once upon a time my daughter developed a rash that kept getting worse.
After a few days it started bleeding and my mind wandered to some dark places.
Will it leave scars? Is it contagious? Is it some sort of flesh-eating bacteria?
My overactive imagination wasn’t doing me any favors.
Anxious and afraid, we took her to the doctor. After a cursory examination he told us exactly what it was and how a simple cream would remedy the whole thing in a few days.
My wild imaginings were stopped in their tracks by his practical knowledge.
Something similar can happen to small business owners.
When confronted with obstacles and opportunities that stretch you beyond the point of your current knowledge, you can find yourself imagining perils that seem downright inevitable.
And then you talk to someone who has been there before and you realize there is a much more accessible pathway you didn’t know existed.
Whoops. That was a lot of energy wasted on worrying because you didn’t know what you didn’t know.
When you feel daunted, overwhelmed, or stuck, look for experts around you who can illuminate your path.
Your worst fears will likely be unfounded, but you won’t be able to see that from where you sit.
When in doubt, reach out.
If you are feeling overwhelmed as a small business owner, download my free Anti-Overwhelm Playbook today. It will help you find the clarity and direction you need to overcome overwhelm and cancel the chaos so you can build your business with complete clarity.

My wife and I have vastly different work experiences.
She drives 20-minutes to her office where she runs HR at our hospital. I walk across the driveway to my office where I support small business owners over the phone.
She spends most of her days in executive meetings.
I spend most of my days working on my businesses, creating content, and working with small business owners to help them make their businesses work for them.
She leads a team of 20-something people. I lead a tiny team.
And yet, regardless of how different our work looks, we have one thing in common: we often find ourselves elbows deep in projects we should have delegated from the jump.
If you are like almost everyone I work with, you can probably relate.
Here are three simple things we should all consider before saying YES to a task:
What will this prevent me from doing? Saying “yes” to one thing is saying “no” to everything else, so it’s worth contemplating if there is more important/interesting work that you’ll miss.
Is this a responsible use of my time? It’s easy to take on a task because you “feel bad” that someone else has to do it or that it has to be done at all, but that isn’t a great way to make a decision that will encumber your limited time, energy, and focus. Is this the highest use of you?
Is this an opportunity to teach someone? Don’t let a desire to swoop in and save the day stunt your team’s growth. Sometimes taking on a task is just a way to avoid training someone...even though doing so would be the greatest gift you could give yourself.
Saying “YES” isn’t always the most helpful thing you can do for yourself, your team, or your business, so think (at least) thrice before you do it. If you are feeling overwhelmed as a small business owner, download my free Anti-Overwhelm Playbook today. It will help you find the clarity and direction you need to overcome overwhelm and cancel the chaos so you can build your business with complete clarity.

Taking effective action on YOUR priorities won’t happen by accident. In fact, without a bit of planning, and some focused effort, it won’t happen at all.I use three anchor activities in my week – the Workday Startup, the Workday Shutdown, and the Weekly Review – to keep me oriented in the right direction. Today starts a 3-week series that will highlight each of these “rituals,” starting with the Workday Startup.I fully expect your version of a Workday Startup to look different than mine, but here’s the goal: your Workday Startup should help you start your days with a consistent set of activities that help you focus on YOUR priorities and affirm your intentions for the day.Having a set of consistent activities gives you a cue that you are about to start working. This has been incredibly important to me since I started working from home, but it has merit wherever your workday begins. The idea is simple: these activities are a gateway from whatever I was doing before work, to the workday.It’s like brushing your teeth before you go to bed or stretching before a workout. The Workday Startup is literally on my calendar for the 30-minutes leading up to my workday and the calendar entry includes a link to the Google Doc that acts as my repeating agenda. At some point you memorize the agenda, but I open the Google Doc anyway because it’s easier to skip the hard parts if I don’t have a checklist staring me in the face.Here’s what I do every morning:Review daily sales reports from my printing business. Now that I am not materially involved in operations, it gives me a day-to-day picture of the customers they are serving, the kinds of projects they are working on, and the flow of cash into the business.Review my calendar and tasks for the day. I’ve already made decisions about how I will spend my time and each morning I am reviewing those choices to ensure they are still the most valid and valuable uses of my time, energy, and focus. I renegotiate if necessary, but mostly I am reminding myself of the work that matters most today.Set alarms on my watch. This probably seems silly, but in a world of incessant notifications, I ensure that any meeting I have with a human has an accompanying alarm that will prompt me if I lose track of time. The alarm in my Apple Watch is silent and persistent, so I have to interact with it to make it stop.Review and respond to any messages. I check my email, slack, and text messages, replying to any that need a response before I dive into my work. I leverage focus modes on my phone to prevent intrusive notifications throughout my workday so I want to be as current as possible before I shut out the world. It is massively important to ensure MY priorities are clearly defined before I do this, because email is filled with Other People’s Priorities and can derail the whole day. This is also a great opportunity to delegate work out to my assistant or other members of my team. Your routine is going to look different, but I challenge you to consider how a block of time designed to help you enter your workday with purpose could change the game for you. What activities would help you to focus your time and energy more intentionally on the priorities YOU set?What is one thing you would do in a Workday Startup?An important note: this is not my “morning routine.” My wife and I workout and pray together each morning before any of this happens. I read, shower, and eat breakfast before diving into this ritual. This block of time is specifically a way to jump start my WORKday.Next week we will dive into the Workday Shutdown routine that helps me close my day out with a sense of completion...and prime myself for the next workday.The new year is right around the corner and I want you to start 2025 with complete clarity about how you want your business to work for you. Grab my new PDF, 3 Questions Every Small Business Owner Should Answer Before The End of the Year.

I recently heard someone offer an exercise to small business owners:
Take your core product offering and develop a version that costs 1/10th the current price, and another that costs 10x the current price.
At first this exercise seems very difficult, maybe even impossible, but intentionally adding a 1/10th constraint or a 10x expansion forces you to look at your offering from radically different perspectives. It opens the door to address potential clients who won’t currently buy from you because you cost too much or too little.
I want to offer a similar challenge to small business owners who have one or more projects that aren’t being completed:
How would you tackle the project if it had to be completed this month? What about if it had to be completed this week? And finally, what if it had to be completed today?
What would get cut out of the plan and what would be left? What are the essential components and how could you achieve your desired outcome if you didn’t have the luxury of not finishing any time soon?
This exercise will also seem difficult, maybe even impossible, but will help you rethink the unnecessary junk that you allow to clog up the works and impede completion.
Parkinson’s Law states that work will expand (or contract...) to fill the time available and it applies to those open-ended projects you just can’t seem to push across the finish line.
Every project of importance needs a deadline.
Most deadlines could be shorter than they are.
So what would you cut if you had to complete that project before you went home today? If that is simply unfathomable, how aggressive could you get with your deadline? Pick a deadline that seems tough but realistic, and then shave a little more time off and see what happens.
You will be absolutely amazed at what is really possible when you force the work into a shorter deadline.The new year is right around the corner and I want you to start 2025 with complete clarity about how you want your business to work for you. Grab my new PDF, 3 Questions Every Small Business Owner Should Answer Before The End of the Year, and you’ll not only be primed to clarify how to get more of what you want from your business, but you’ll have a chance to grab 90-minutes of free coaching with me.