Build to Enough | Avoiding the Burnout Breakdown

Keila talks about recognizing, preventing, and dealing with burnout, especially for small business owners and CEOs who feel pressure to always be "on." She shares tips for identifying signs of burnout in yourself and your team, taking time off preventatively, checking in with employees, delegating appropriately, and being empathetic when burnout still occurs. Keila emphasizes we all need to make space to be human even when the work still needs to get done.

Connect with Keila!
LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/keilahilltrawick
Website - www.krht.co

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Creators & Guests

Host

Keila Hill-Trawick, CPA, MBA

Helping entrepreneurs create and maintain the business they want | Building to Enough | LinkedIn Top Voice | Intuit Partner Council | Accounting Firm Owner

What is Build to Enough ?

Little Fish Accounting presents Build To Enough. The pursuit of endless growth and scaling can leave entrepreneurs feeling burned out and unfulfilled. This podcast explores how to build sustainable, purpose-driven businesses that align with your lifestyle and values, rather than defined by rapid expansion alone. On this show, we’ll reframe definitions of success, provide strategies for structuring companies around desired lifestyles, and share stories of entrepreneurs finding deeper fulfillment by focusing on “enough.” Join us as we discuss moving off the hamster wheel and building businesses with balance and meaning.

Warning: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!

Keila Hill-Trawick: Hello. You're listening to Build to Enough, a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to scale at their own pace. I'm your host, Keyla Hill Traywick, and I'll be your chief storyteller and cheerleader in a world that glorifies endless expansion, we're tuning out the noise and discussing the beauty of enough. Each episode will dive into inspiring stories, practical insights, and strategies to cultivate sustainable success on your [00:00:30] own terms. So whether you're a solopreneur, small business owner, or aspiring entrepreneur, get ready for a refreshing take on the entrepreneurial journey. This is build to enough. Hello, hello and welcome back to Build to Enough.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Today we are talking burnout, and as somebody who has experienced it more than a couple times, um, I really want to be able to help you to avoid that. I think that it is hard enough in this [00:01:00] time with insert everything here going on to not get burned out. Um, but I think it's especially important that small business owners and those with really small teams have a sense of how to avoid it because it affects your businesses a lot differently than it affects somebody who has a bunch of other people on staff to make up when they are falling down. So let's get into it. So recognizing, uh, preventing, discussing, [00:01:30] acknowledging all of that around burnout is imperative for small business owners. When you're a CEO that is the leader of a business, the leader of a team, the leader in your industry, there are a lot of pressures being put on you, and if you are not careful, you will burn out.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Really, before you even realize that you're heading that way. And there are some ways that you can identify burnout before you reach kind of one of those [00:02:00] critical periods. So at Little Fish, we have what we call sick and sad days. Meaning if you are sick or you are sad, that might just be a day off for you. I instituted that because I remember needing what we are commonly referring to now as mental health days, and them not really being accessible to me. Sometimes you just can't do it. Sometimes you wake up and you're like, yeah, I ain't got it today. And you need to be able to have the space to be able to [00:02:30] take off, step back, take breaks. Now, the ways that I started noticing that I was on my way to burnout was I just didn't feel like myself. I am super hyper productive. I am a person that likes to work. I like to get things done, and especially in this business, because I'm so passionate about what we do and how we do it. I would find myself working all of the time now. That is its own thing and it's what led to the burnout. But one of the ways that I started knowing that [00:03:00] I was headed in a different direction is I just had no motivation. I couldn't get up. It wasn't just that I couldn't work for ten hours a day, which I shouldn't have been.

Keila Hill-Trawick: It was that I couldn't get up to work at all. I couldn't get myself focused to be able to do the work that I was usually so excited about. You can also tell on your team when these things are coming up. Frequent days off, emotional exhaustion, just a drain of energy. You know your team, y'all talk all the time. [00:03:30] It can be really easy to see the signs of like they are not themselves either. And be clear all of this is not related to your business. People should have whole lives outside of work, and your business might not be the reason for their burnout or even your own. But once you start seeing those signs, they are definitely going to affect the business. And so you need to see those and address those as soon as possible. When you don't, it can spread to others in the business. And we're [00:04:00] going to talk about that next. So let's talk about specifically burnout for CEOs. Because remember you're a leader in all of those places. And on top of the pressure that there is for you to just deliver, this is also pressure for you to keep the morale and the energy up for all of the people that you're working with. When you're burnt out, you're decreasing the morale of everybody on the team. You're the head right? Everybody is looking to you to really know what next steps are.

Keila Hill-Trawick: And here's the thing. We're not always [00:04:30] in a place where we can put on a happy face. We're not always in a position to be able to show up with joy and cheer, but you have a responsibility to really make sure that you are not dragging down the team with your own stuff. Right. And so a couple of ways that I would say that you want to address those. The first thing is take the time off. It is much more important that you rest and allow the business and the team to carry you when you can't do it, than it is to keep showing up when you don't have the energy [00:05:00] to give it. I kind of liken this to going to the gym, right? My. A trainer tells me all the time, if you don't eat or fuel your body or get yourself ready, the exercises that you want to do, you can't push energy where there isn't any. Take an afternoon off or a day when you can, so that you can really come back refreshed and in a way that you can support your team and everything that they need. Because the next thing is, when the CEO is burned out, it can lead to ineffective leadership. It is really hard [00:05:30] to lead when there are so many things on your plate that you can't catch your team, that you can't review their work properly, that you can't give them appropriate feedback, or even really show up for your clients when something goes wrong on your team.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Everybody can't be perfect all of the time and you won't catch it all. That's really not what review is about, but you're going to miss a lot of that and miss opportunities for you to lead the team in ways that they can do better when you are burning out. So you'll want to catch that early. And when you start seeing that for [00:06:00] yourself, start carving out time. When you do have the room to be able to go into the business and see what's going on, have those conversations with your team that they need, because leadership can't just go away. But it can be managed differently based on the cycles of energy, time and capacity, emotional capacity that you have throughout the periods. Finally, burnout can lead to poor decision making, everything from investing financially in things that you shouldn't have, [00:06:30] making the wrong hires to hiring or bringing on clients that you shouldn't. When you're burnt out, you're tired, your body is emotionally probably mentally exhausted, and that can make it hard to be sharp on the decisions that you're making next. And so we want to make sure that before you get to that point, before you're making decisions that can have a lasting impact on everybody that you work with, that you're seeing that early enough that you're taking that time, that when you show, hey, I'm not really [00:07:00] in a good space right now that you cancel those calls, that you move those team meetings, that you give yourself space to really redirect and show up in the ways that you want to.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Now, let me pause here and say, all of this can sound like a luxury. When you are overworked and overwhelmed. It can be really hard to give yourself time. But what I will tell you is this if you don't do it, your body will stop you. It will get sick. It will get tired, your brain will get foggy, you will make mistakes. [00:07:30] And so yes, we don't all have the opportunities, me included, to just take weeks away or sabbaticals, even a full day to really be able to do that for ourselves. But start small, take an hour for yourself. Make sure you're giving yourself a lunch break every day, an hour in the mornings to yourself before you log in to work. We can't always do it, but we need to make ourselves a priority so that we're being proactive about avoiding burnout, as opposed to being reactive, to try to get ourselves out of it because it [00:08:00] takes a lot longer to recover from it than it does to take the time at the beginning before we fall into it. So now let's talk about preventing teen burnout. Now we talked about before managing capacity and hiring, bringing the right people on to the team. But you also need to be clear about the bandwidth that it takes to take the role.

Keila Hill-Trawick: So an example don't hire somebody part time that really requires a full time employee. Don't bring on a contractor that you know [00:08:30] really should be two part timers because of the hours that this needs to overlap. You need to be really transparent and clear about the time that it takes to do the job. And here's the thing we are going to be wrong. You are going to think it's a part time job that actually takes full time hours, but it's so important that you're checking in with your team to make sure that your expectations and their ability, capacity and their reality is actually aligning with that. You also want to make sure that you are compensating them when [00:09:00] that changes. Don't hire somebody part time. Bring them on full time and give them a tiny bump. Your budget needs to account for the fact that if this is actually a full time role, what should that cost? What benefits are you potentially offering and what other expenses might come alongside that? That may mean that before this team even gets hired on, you're being really clear about what this job is going to look like because burnt out employees quit and hiring is hard. [00:09:30] It sucks sometimes rehiring is very difficult as well. And so like we talked about before, about getting the right body in the right place, you also want to make sure that you're checking in with them periodically, especially when your team is small, to make sure that they are doing what they expect to be doing and that they are not being overwhelmed.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Here's the thing at the end of the day, not all fits are the right fits, so they may want to do their best, and their best just isn't enough for the role that you need them for. Be clear about that before everybody [00:10:00] gets miserable, before they're overworked and you're burned out and stressed out from managing them. This also means that you're going to have to have very clear communication and delegation. You need to be having ongoing conversations, not just with individual employees, but with the team. It can be easy when your team is small to kind of silo yourself. You become the spoke in the wheel and you talk to each of them individually. But maybe they're not talking to each other. What is each of them running into that they could really support each other on? How can everybody step in to really make sure [00:10:30] that things get done, so that it doesn't all fall on one person? What ideas might another team member have about systems or processes that can make it easier? Again, you want to reduce their overwhelm. And so getting the whole team involved, having those conversations and then delegating appropriately when you see that things have changed is going to be important to avoid team burnout and to really save your own sanity. All right, so what does all this mean? I have seen a lot of clients, a lot of friends, peers, [00:11:00] other people in professional service, providing spaces really get to their wit's end.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Recently, I've heard a lot of I can't get out of bed. I'm overwhelmed. I'm working all the time, and some of that is a phase, right? There are definitely hustle phases in all of our businesses where we have to be like, this time is just going to be hard. I'm in one right now, but I knew it was coming, and so I planned the time that I could plan to give myself breaks. I hired [00:11:30] when I could, and I waited when the right person didn't show up to make sure that I was properly supported. And in the meantime, I'm making sure that I'm taking these moments for myself to really acknowledge and recognize, hey, it's time to exercise. It's time to meditate. It's time to have a fun meeting with the team instead of a work meeting with the team. All of these things that we can really be doing to avoid burnout on the front end. And even after all of that, sometimes people are going to get overworked and overwhelmed, try to catch [00:12:00] that early, try to be in a position to be a safe space for your employees and team members to come to you and say, hey, this is a really difficult time. What can you do to really accommodate them, whether that's time off or reduced workload? Remember, everybody has to be excellent, and when people are starting to get run down, that impedes on their performance, their ability to do well and their ability to feel good when they're at work.

Keila Hill-Trawick: So do what you can check in early and often, and when it does [00:12:30] happen, be empathetic and kind. We're all human beings that are doing our best, and sometimes doing your best looks a lot lower than the days when you are really operating at full capacity. So give space for people to be human beings. Yes, the work has to get done, but we also have to take care of ourselves. And like I said, if we don't, our bodies will show us where we are ruining that. It was so good to get into this topic with you all and [00:13:00] build to enough is just a couple of episodes in. We would love to hear from you about topics you'd like to hear about, or feedback about the ones that we've already done. Send an email to podcast at Accounting Comm and we will respond. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Build to Enough. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate and share the love with your fellow entrepreneur friends, and make sure to sign up for the Build to Enough newsletter. The link is in the show notes. Stay tuned for more [00:13:30] episodes as we continue to redefine success one intentional step at a time.