Shortchange your business and you won’t be able to feed your family. Chain yourself to your desk and you’ll soon be a stranger to your loved ones. What’s an entrepreneur to do?
Dave Denko is in a panic. With his startup, Sherbourne Candy Company, approaching its one-year anniversary, he’s getting rave reviews from customers he’s dazzled with his custom-carved, hand-decorated chocolates. Now he’s ready to take the company to the next level. He’s charging ahead with more than six deals that he hopes will get his products onto retailers’ shelves. Ultimately, he wants Sherbourne Candy Company to become the Godiva of custom-made chocolates.
Like many entrepreneurs, though, he’s under financial pressure to achieve his goals quickly. In order to develop the kind of inventory he needs to fill rush orders, he has to invest considerable cash into the ingredients he needs for his specialties. That means tapping his personal resources and living in constant fear that he won’t be able to pay the mortgage next month.
Denko quit his corporate job because he was tired and grumpy all the time. He wanted to be an at-home, happy, connected husband and father. But he’s dangerously close to melt down because he’s working 16-hour days to sign the deals that will help him move from respected chocolatier to prosperous businessman.
Like many of the entrepreneurs I advise in my consulting business, Denko thinks that the answer is for him to work harder and longer, until a big deal comes through. But I reminded him that if he breaks down from overwork, there will be no chocolate business at all. And if his family disintegrates from the stress, there’s no real incentive for him to carry on the business anyway.
That doesn’t mean he should ignore reality. The average entrepreneur struggles with cash flow problems for three years before his business becomes stable and profitable. And many small business owners shut their doors because they don’t have the financial — or personal — resources to make it through the first crucial years of business ownership.
My advice for folks like Denko? Aggressive time management. Every day, we make hundreds of decisions about how to spend our time. And for each activity we take on, there’s another one we can’t fit in that time slot.
It’s essential to plan your life in a way that allows you to spend the hours you have on earth on your highest priorities. If you know you need to allot time to closing a new deal and playing with your two-year-old this week, then it’s important to say no to other, less important commitments that could prevent you from meeting those goals.
To do so, you may have to be ruthless about filtering out distractions. There’s nothing wrong with screening phone calls with your answering machine while you’re working on writing up specs for an important project, then responding later, when you have time. Or keeping a conversation with a talkative colleague brief, because you know that an hour you spend chatting in the morning will be an hour less you have to spend with your youngsters after work. Just because something is a high priority for someone else at a given moment, it doesn’t have to become one for you.
The irony of the entrepreneurial game is that to play it well, you must walk a delicate line between focusing on the short term and keeping yourself and your family fit to hang in there for as long as it takes for your business to succeed. The best way to handle the kind of extreme pressure Denko is facing is to make decisions that are consistent with your values and the overall goals – personal, professional, and spiritual – that you’ve set for yourself. Usually, that makes life a whole lot simpler.