Sometimes being a small business owner really sucks. And I am probably being kind in my choice of words there.
Long hours are certainly part of it, it’s expected, no, it’s demanded – if not by your business partner, it’s your clients or your own guilty conscience for daring to relax when you should really be working. It’s knowing that 4 hours sleep tonight is okay because you’ll make up for it on the weekend – maybe. It’s staying back to do one more emails before the commute home, and it’s that one last glance on the inbox before getting the 4 hours’ sleep you so richly deserve.
Cash flow is another part of it. We all know the statistics. Most small businesses fail within the first whatever years of operation – mostly due to insufficient capital at the very beginning, or insufficient capital to get to critical mass. (In other cases, it’s your trusted friend who borrowed money just for a month or so to close that big deal, and promptly disappeared – but we’ll leave that for another blog, shall we). Stressing about cash flow usually occupies part of the 4 hours’ sleep that small business owners are left with each day. There are no crystal balls in small business and, for most, no safety net. “It is what it is” as my business partner would say, daily actually. Sadly, not even the weekend will relieve worries about cash flow.
Put together long hours and cash flow worries, and we come to a really ‘sucky’ part – work/life balance, or imbalance to be more accurate. As I child I used to dream of the perfect life – getting married, two and a half kids, a dog and the old house (that I renovated of course) with the white picket fence. I probably heard or saw that on a ridiculous B grade Hollywood movie or TV soapie but nevertheless it stuck with me. Considerations for work/life balance didn’t factor in at all in my perfect life, but most small business owners struggle to get even close to a work/life balance, let alone the perfect life. Meals are taken between meetings; gym? is that place you used to go to a long, long time ago, and you get to see your spouse and children sparingly, often in passing in the hallway at home or the Saturday morning drive to their sports venue. “Me time” is something you plan for, hope for, but only after the work gets done of course.
But I have left the most important for last, what is really hard, is having to make tough choices when times are tough enough already, particularly when it comes to a company’s most important asset – its people. You can never have enough good people in your organisation. A manager of mine once told me that if you find a star, hire them – even if you don’t have a place for them in your organisation, make one; and it’s not always easy to recognise a star from a firecracker when you are desperate for good staff. It’s easy to mismatch an eager recruit with an empty seat in your organisation.
And then you are stuck with the firecracker, and you work even harder to make it all work. But at least you have someone in that empty seat to help, right? It’s hard to find someone to fill that empty seat, true but it’s even harder to realise that you’ve made a mistake, that there is a mismatch and you have to let them go. That’s where being a small business owner really sucks. Despite being desperate to fill that empty seat, and that everyone is already working to capacity, you now have to decide to keep the firecracker or keep searching for the star (however distant). I have always dreaded having to look at someone I hired and then let them go, even though I know it’s for the good of the company, and of the new hire as well.
Realising you have made a mistake, it is, in my opinion, better to call it quits early rather than further frustrate the team with eager new recruits who cannot keep up, or don’t have the same team spirit or don’t fit the culture or a million other reasons. Yes, we go back to square one with our recruitment exercise, and yes, the overworked team will be disappointed at having to take up the slack again, but the alternative can potentially destabilise an already stressed team. Better the devil you know, so to speak.
I call it tough love, and it is a very sobering but very real part of growing a small business. But it still sucks.
