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Business success is dependent on a solid financial foundation & success looks different to everyone & there is a lack of equity of access to resources and information for small business owners and independent contractors & there is a societal narrative making us believe “balance” is our ultimate goal & … There are so many “&”s that impact being your own boss. Let’s have some frank discussions on the basics of business with a holistic focus on everything that helps business owners define and find success.
Molly Beyer: [00:00:08] Welcome to The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond, the podcast where we have frank discussions on the basics of business with a holistic focus on everything that helps business owners define and find success. Each episode is a reminder that success isn't one thing, it's a whole lot of ambiguous ands. Like, subscribe, or follow, and let's explore these ambiguous ands.
[00:00:36] Hello and welcome to The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and beyond. I'm your host, Molly Beyer, and I'm here to lead you through frank and holistic conversations on the basics of business. So today we're doing a little bit scripted, unscripted, outlined, to a subject that I've wanted to revisit for quite a while. Everything I do in business is centered around systems, it's intentional business design, capacity defining success. You know, I've got those constant themes through what we're talking about here, successes: creating more money with less stress. Systems protect sanity. Businesses should work for the owner, not consume them. Capacity really does matter. Delegation isn't weakness, its strategy. Knowing your numbers reduces anxiety. Building margins into your business is essential. And so all of those things are absolutely true. And one of the assumptions that most business advice shares is essentially that idea that you're going to wake up tomorrow with pretty much the same amount of energy that you have today, and that assumption, at least for me, is not true. And it's the same for a lot of people that I know, and I think more and more all the time.
Molly Beyer: [00:02:05] Some mornings I do wake up totally ready to conquer the world and other mornings I can't think. Brain fog is so strong. My joints hurt. I'm totally fatigued. I just feel like I can't do anything. Sometimes it's like walking around with wet sand in my joints or feeling like I'm being pulled into the core of the earth. And that's really sucky, when my body just absolutely says no. And a lot of times that there is actually no warning that it's going to happen. And for me, that unpredictability really changes everything and sometimes has told me that I really have no business running a business. And that's not true. And I think a lot of people get in that trap and decide that they don't have any business running a business, because their body just isn't always going to cooperate with what they're doing. Because really, that advice that we hear, that hustle and grind advice is wake up super early and work harder, be disciplined, push through, don't miss days, grind, grind, grind. And really, those do assume that our bodies are consistent. And like we said, there's just they're not mine's not most people aren't. And that doesn't make me lazy, it just means that I'm playing a different game.
Molly Beyer: [00:03:43] That's a hard thing to accept and a mindset shift to accept and to move to. And it's been a real struggle for me. I think that there's these assumptions about entrepreneurship that you do have to work 70, 80 hours a week. You have to give up everything. You have to pour every single piece of yourself into the business or it's not going to be successful. And that's just simply not true. And I know that that can work for some people and that's great if your body can do that, if your brain, if your family, if your life, if everything that you have going on can do that, that's great. I remember when I started my business, I started around the same time as another bookkeeper in a group that I was in, of people moving into the virtual bookkeeping space and people would see his successes and be like, oh my God, I want to be able to do that. And he'd be like, hey, I am unmarried, I am young, I have some savings available. I don't really do a lot. I have the ability to hustle and grind. I am healthy. He's like, you can't compare your success to mine because we're starting in different places and we have different situations. And even though I had gotten to a place in my life where I was really starting to accept those things as true, it was so helpful to see somebody able to see somebody who, who seemed like the true entrepreneur, say something like that and say, just because this is my story doesn't mean it has to be yours.
Molly Beyer: [00:05:39] And that helped me to really be able to sort of tailor my business, to be something that fit me and fit what I could do. Early on, I knew there were limits and I tried really hard to keep track of how much time I was spending and things. But then my business really started to grow. And then we had a series of events happen. There were family things that came up and that made it difficult. And so it was really nice to have a team. But I also then while dealing with all of those other things that were happening around me and managing all the normal day to day stuff, was then managing a team and also working in my business. And then my body stopped working, and it was several months to figure out what was going on. But it was also several years of thing on top of thing on top of thing that I had pushed through and grinded through. And I had to stop, but I couldn't stop my business.
Molly Beyer: [00:06:55] And so things really had to shift and change for me. And so I really did have to start focusing differently. And I had to start to do that mindset shift because when I'm having a bad day, when I'm not able to think clearly, when I'm in that place where I'm just so exhausted that I can hardly move and I still have to get up and get dressed and take care of my kid and try to meet whatever obligations that I can. And people look at me and I look fine. Sometimes I don't, people I know well, I can get on a Zoom call with somebody I know well, and they could say, oh, you're not okay. When the rest of the world might say, I look fine. It's really hard when you think of your productivity in those spaces and in those days. I think we start equating productivity with success, and that's silly because if I'm not able to be as productive today because I don't have the capacity, it doesn't mean I'm not smart. It doesn't mean I'm not ambitious. It doesn't mean I'm not committed to what I'm doing. It has nothing to do with my worth as a person or a business owner. It just really talking about what I can do today.
Molly Beyer: [00:08:34] And that is a really hard thing to separate out for me and for, I think a lot of people. So, you know, what, what I really had to do is build systems. And those systems are great. They're great for efficiency. They're great for expanding your business's capacity and being able to build a team systems are amazing for so many things, but they also save energy for me. If brain fog hits, if I've got a checklist or recurring calendar items or SOPs in place, I've got templates for emails. I don't have to think as much, so those automations do really save me in those moments and being able to still run my business and do the things that I need to do without having to expend quite as much energy. And so that's a lot of why I create systems for myself. It's not because I'm organized, because truly I am not an organized person. I've had to learn organization. Part of that is ADHD. You lose everything if you don't have some sort of organization in place. So you learn kind of young to make sure that things are in certain places. And so part of that has been using those same tactics to just generally build systems in that help keep me organized when I can't even focus remotely on being organized in any way, shape, or form myself.
Molly Beyer: [00:10:06] I've also really realized that delegation again is super important, but it's also not a luxury for me. You know, I spend a lot of the money that comes into my business on my employees. And that's the only way that my business can really continue. And so within the business, I outsource bookkeeping to employees. I outsource payroll, I outsource virtual assisting. I delegate things to those people. I make sure that all of that stuff can run without me. But then in my own home, I delegate things like home organization, cleaning, even meal prep, you know, we'll do some meal delivery service stuff just because it takes pressure off and makes sure people can still eat well. Really, it's anything that's buying back any physical or mental energy for me at all if it's necessary. Yes, they're time saving and that's great. And I think everybody can use that. But for me, it's really about preserving my health and my overall sense of well-being. I talk a lot about success. And I talked in our first episode too, about sort of early definitions of success and how I really played into a lot of sort of those general societal ideas of what success was for me as a woman, for me as a driven and ambitious worker and things like that.
[00:11:43] And so much of that has changed with my health issues over the years, and then having my daughter when I was older, all of that stuff has really shifted kind of the way I think about it. I want to have a profitable business. I want to be able to fully support my family, and that's a future idea of success. I also want to be able to spend as much time with my kid as I want, and to make sure that I can preserve my health daily so that I don't end up having as many flares. I don't end up having as many bad days because I'm aware of what's happening. So now success is maybe the bills in the house are paid. I've made payroll. My employees are happy. My clients are well served. I have that time to be with my kid. I can make dinner. I don't have to spend time recovering from the things that I've done and that really feels like what success is. And it's not settling. It's really, it's an intentional idea of like, what truly feels calm and good for me and building my life around that.
Molly Beyer: [00:13:04] And you know, I'm pretty open with my clients, with my contacts, with my employees, with everybody about the things that go on in my life. And it's hard because I feel like I go from one health crisis to another. And so my clients might see that. They might see a canceled or rescheduled meeting. They might see a deadline for something I needed to do missed. And that's hard. What they don't see on the back end is all of that stuff that even if they're looking at my face, they couldn't see. They don't feel me being pulled into the center of the earth with fatigue. And, they don't see the haze that I feel like I'm walking through when my brain just literally cannot think or focus. They don't see the pain that's happening in my body as I'm moving around, and I think people with chronic illness get really good at masking. And as much as I like to take masks off and be very real, it's hard to not do that. I think there's an expectation in society of what we do. There's also a lot of hidden costs. We really have people with chronic illness. We have to truly budget all of those things to stay.
Molly Beyer: [00:14:37] Okay. Like it's energy, there's pain, there's recovery, there's the medication schedules, there's appointments, there's sleep issues, there's brain fog, there's emotional bandwidth, there's all of these things and there's a cost to all of those. And so business owners are constantly budgeting with money, but I also have to really budget with those energies. A lot of people now are talking about this idea of spoon theory and this is something that a lot of people with chronic illness talk about is like, we start our day with so many spoons and you have to decide how you're going to spend them. And a lot of times it's a choice between one thing and another. And so if I wake up with 50 spoons, it's fine, and I can budget those a lot easier. But if I wake up with ten and I also never know how many I'm going to wake up with, you know, and if I've over spent spoons a day before, I can generally know it's going to be a hard day and I'm going to have less to go with. And so, you know, maybe by the time that I've even gotten out of bed, gotten dressed, fed my cats, had breakfast, I might have spent 7 to 10 spoons just doing that.
Molly Beyer: [00:15:49] And so if I only had ten to spend, that's my day. Reading emails maybe is three. If I'm responding back, it's 2 to 5 more. You know, having a meeting, that's a lot more, because depending on how I'm feeling that day, I'm going to have to expend more energy to be present in that meeting, to be like present in that meeting, and to sit there and to look like things are okay. If I have to do things with my kid, I have to reserve spoons for that. If I have to, you know, do a volunteer event. I have to spend spoons for that. So everything takes those. And by the end of the day, I generally have nothing left. So I have to make a lot of decisions about how I'm going to budget those spoons so that I just don't end up in that recovery mode all the time, and I think that there's something, and I think this happens with everybody, in business, things come up and we have to we have to make changes. And there's a lot of sometimes guilt that, you know, that goes into that. Well, there's a lot more when I have to cancel meetings and reschedule meetings and not answer emails fast enough. It's so much energy to look healthy while I feel awful and to wonder what clients are thinking about me and to feel like I'm constantly letting people down.
Molly Beyer: [00:17:27] These conversations that we have internally are so exhausting. I've had to do a lot of mindset work and focusing on what I can do. It's thinking about things differently. It's also changing words. I'm a very visual thinker and if I hear a word I'm going to take it as what it is. And so a lot of my mindset shifts involve changing words. So, you know, discipline has to change to something like building systems, hustle moves to protecting my capacity. Perfection moves to creating resilience. Something like even depending on my memory, that has to change to documenting everything so that it's all written down when I can't even remember trying harder. It's changing the process, assuming tomorrow is going to be the same as today, assuming tomorrow is going to be okay. No, I have to work with what I have today and always assume that I'm not going to have enough to give tomorrow. So I have to prepare for that. And there's a big grief that comes with that, that changing capacity. You know, there's, there's a lot of grief that I've had to go through and process for the person that I used to be and that I thought I was going to be, a lot of acceptance of who I am and, and what goes on.
[00:19:10] But there's also been a lot of growth and expansion in certain areas for me as I navigate the world and especially navigating owning a business. I am better at prioritizing, I have more empathy. I'm more efficient. I'm better at documentation. I'm better at financial planning. I'm getting a lot better at building realistic timelines. Creating that sustainable business is all about that sustainability for me. And I really understand what burnout is going to look like before it happens and try to build my business to handle my burnouts when they do happen. I really, really have realized that, yeah, system save sanity and business. And they really help things run better. But for me, I really build them because they do give me freedom, to keep working on the days when it's hard to spend the time with my family, to build that business that works with my life instead of really constantly fighting against it. And a lot of that is planning for my worst days and not my best days. Because that is what a resilient business is.
Molly Beyer: [00:20:33] It's not, how do we do at our best? It's how do we, at our worst, have to survive through that. And it's giving myself a lot of permission to stop proving myself, to stop pretending that I can be everything to everyone, grieving the loss of the person who could take care of herself and everyone else who came along. Because I can't do that anymore, and I have to do a lot more focusing on myself. And there's a really hard reality in that, but that is where designing around that reality that I have now, the reality that I do live in is far more sustainable than that constant fight to overcome where I am. So really, if you're someone whose body doesn't always cooperate, I really hope this reminds you that your business doesn't have to depend on perfection. It really is all about preparation and building those systems so that you can be successful even on those really, really tough days. But this is also true for people to who don't necessarily have issues with their own bodies, but they're caring for children or parents or both while also trying to run their business, because those people's bodies don't often cooperate either. So even if it's not your own body or your own mental health, these strategies do still hold true.
[00:22:07] And really my systems are not just about efficiency. They are truly about accessibility. So it's, it's that constant thinking of like, oh, not how can I save 15 minutes? But you know, how can I still serve my clients when I can't show up as my best? So, hopefully this has helped some people feel like they're not alone. If you've recently been diagnosed or you've stepped into a situation where your world no longer looks how it used to look, you're not alone. There's a lot of us out there and work on building your life around your worst days so that your best days can be even better and that you don't feel like you're constantly fighting with yourself and against an idea that is no longer your reality. So thanks for hanging out with me today while we go into a little bit more of the emotional side of running a business when your body doesn't always want to cooperate. So I'd love to hear your feedback on today's episode, as well as any requests for future content. So drop a comment or suggestion and join us next time for more frank and holistic conversations on the basics of business. Please also like, subscribe, or follow so that you never miss an episode. And until next time, I'm Molly Beyer and this has been The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond. Have a wonderful day!