Life Balance for Busy Entrepreneurs
Wealth is discretionary time and our aim is to build yours daily.
How many weeks of vacation did you take last year? Do you have planned for next year?
If you have to be there all of the time, you don’t have a business, you have a job. — Phil Symchych
The purpose of your business is to provide fuel for your life. Otherwise, your business can, and will, consume as much of your time, energy and soul as you give it.
Key steps in achieving life balance for busy entrepreneurs:
- Scheduling important family dates and vacations in advance, and sticking to them
- Focusing on your family and personal relationships as much (or more) as you focus on your customers and your business
- Taking care of your physical and mental health
- Building a management team that can make real decisions (hiring, firing, spending money)
- Creating an organizational chart for the next five or ten years and identifying the key positions and people for succession planning
- Documenting the management and business processes that are critical to your business
- Running your company like a real business that is separate from you
- Having hobbies and interests outside of your business
- Helping others – through philanthropy or coaching and mentoring
He knows how to coordinate life goals with business goals. — Monte Stewart, McCrank Stewart Johnson Law Firm
Many entrepreneurs, it is said, only work half-time; any 12 hours of the day they want. Having an 84-hour work week may have been a reality during the start-up phase, but business owners who transition beyond this unsustainable work load to become true managers and leaders have built businesses and management teams that support the owner’s life style.
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True wealth, according to Alan Weiss, one of the top independent consultants in the world, is ‘discretionary time’ as ‘you can always make another dollar, but you can’t make another minute.’ Symco & Co. has the systems and processes to help busy entrepreneurs achieve a better work/life balance.
We didn’t take holidays as a family. I wanted us to have a life, and now we do. We have taken two weeks for holidays every year for the last seven years. Our family has definitely benefited. — Teresa Hensrud, Industrial Scale
Our most successful clients (and my grandmother who lived to 102) have these life balance activities:
- Pleasure from work — Most of the successful people we know like what they do every day. Taking pride in a job well done according to your own standards, and without the need for external recognition, will help you to utilize your natural talents and be your own cheerleader. If you’re having fun doing it, it’s probably not even work.
- Continual learning — There are so many things to do, see and experience in the world. Curiosity and a desire to learn new things will keep your intellectual muscle in great shape.
- Regular exercise — “The purpose of our bodies,” Sylvester Stallone is quoted as saying, “is to carry around our brains.” Exercise can be in the form of golf with friends, intense one-on-one workouts with a trainer, walking the dog, and other forms of regular exercise for at least half an hour a day or an hour every second day. My grandmother was riding her three-wheeled bike into her 93rd year!
- Good nutrition — Since food is fuel for our bodies, basic needs include lots of fruit and vegetables, fiber, protein, healthy fats (fish) and water. Processed foods that include sugars and flours don’t contain as many nutrients and are higher in calories than raw and unprocessed foods.
- Family and social life — Running a business can be a stressful and, at times, lonely existence. Research shows that the people who live the longest have strong ties with their families and their communities.
- Spiritual health — Being connected with something larger than us can help to keep things in perspective.
- Financial health — If wealth is discretionary time, then money is the fuel for freedom.
- Proactive maintenance — Regular check-ups from your health professionals will help you maintain good health and deal proactively with problems before they become crises.
- Time to do what you want — Putting yourself first on your schedule (massage, reading, music) will help you feel better and empower you to take better care of others, because you’ve taken care of yourself first.
I hired Phil to help me work smarter, not harder. He brought organization and efficiency to my management style and I was able to reduce my working hours, while making more money. — Kelly Ozem, Chartered Accountant
