Countless solutions are aimed at the overwhelmed business owner, but the harsh reality is that most of those solutions do little, if anything, to address the root of the problem.
Why? Well, most of the advice out there provides cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all solutions to very nuanced problems.
When you’re overwhelmed, you don’t want another trite productivity hack, you want to fix the damn overwhelm once and for all.
So many of my clients come to me feeling like they’ll never be caught up, and that they really must be missing something. They feel like the problem. (Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me!)
They’ve tried longer hours, hiring support, building systems, course after course on productivty, strategy after strategy and yet, they’re still drowning in a sea of to do’s that never ends.
Here’s the thing though – this overwhelm is not their fault.
The true problem is a lack of specific solutions designed to address their actual overwhelm as a business owner.
Because what they need is a combination of strategic support that helps address the root causes of the overwhelm and actual execution support that gets things done without their direct oversight.
That’s where an online business manager with a highly skilled team can make all the difference.
My goal is to get you unstuck from being an overwhelmed business owner and into a place where you can shine. A place where you focus on what you do best and what actually moves the business forward. And, better yet, a place where you do not feel like you’re drowning.
So how do we do that?
We start with an actual plan.
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before…
Before we look at the steps I take to help you ditch the overwhelmed business owner persona, let’s see if any of this sounds familiar.
- “I don’t know how to prioritize.”
- “There are so many things on my to-do that seem like they should be simple… but they aren’t.”
- “There are so many moving pieces that I feel paralyzed and can’t get started.”
- “I work hard to barely get anything off my to-do list every week.”
- “I don’t know how I can realistically get everything done.”
I promise you aren’t alone if any of these resonate with you. Everyone experiences overwhelm as a business owner at some point. The issue is when you get stuck and can’t move forward.
My role when working with my clients is to help them uplevel their business performance and figure out how to accomplish their actual goals throughout their week — without adding more work or longer hours to their already full plate.
Now, let’s look at how it happens.
Step One: Create a Strategic Plan
My first step with clients is to help them develop a strategic plan for accomplishing their goals.
Whether they’re building a membership site, launching a podcast, launching a retreat, or creating a new program, I help them create the actual to-do list of all the moving pieces involved in accomplishing that task. Then, I delegate all the moving pieces for them. I take all the various tasks and assign them to whoever is the most suitable on the team, which leaves them with a few key items to do or approve.
Doing this removes the overwhelming task of independently creating every piece of the to-do list. This can be a huge bottleneck for business owners when they’re dealing with unfamiliar tech or tasks because they really don’t know what needs to be done, they just know the outcome they want. It also means they don’t have to decide who does what themselves. This removes so much of the mental load and frees them up to accomplish more tasks that require their specific input.
By helping provide some oversight and creating that to-do list, they now have a partner to lean on and help them tame the overwhelm.
Step Two: Prioritize What to Keep and What to Give
One thing I’ve learned from my decade-plus career as an online business manager is that even an overwhelmed business owner looking for relief can have difficulty giving tasks away.
For people operating as solo shows, the idea of handing off tasks can feel quite uncomfortable. They’re used to doing it all themselves and worry that only they can do it well.
However, you can’t do it all, and by spreading yourself so thin, you may not be performing tasks at the level you’d really like. And, you’re likely preventing yourself from doing the real work that will move the business forward by holding on to all these random tasks other people can do.
During this step, I help you prioritize what you keep and what you outsource. We look at all the initiatives and projects going on and make strategic decisions about all the elements that *must* be handled by you and what you can give to my team or another suitable professional.
One of my favorite questions to ask during this process is, “Yes, but does it have to be done by you?” After years of doing everything, it is super common for the business owner to default to just doing it themselves. But by stopping and asking that question, you can often see that it does not, in fact, have to be done by you in all cases.
Step Three: Diagnose the Overwhelm
The third step I work through with clients is to help them diagnose what is causing the overwhelm. Often, clients don’t know precisely what the issue is; they just know they’re too busy. They’re an overwhelmed business owner with too much to do, but they can’t always identify why that is.
Some clients feel like they “should” have plenty of time to do everything on their to-do list, yet nothing is actually getting done. So, part of my job in those cases is helping them identify what is truly the problem.
- Is it that you have too much to do?
- Is it that you have too many things that you don’t want to be doing?
- Is it that you don’t have the right tools to finish the tasks you need to finish?
- Is there something about how you set up your work week that is causing issues?
- Or better yet, are structural issues within the business actually causing the bottlenecks?
Often, the thing causing the overwhelm isn’t only the tangible to-do’s on the list. It’s things like the type of task, not knowing how to do the tasks, not wanting to do the tasks because they’re boring and not in their zone of genius, or even the combination of tasks that need to be gone on a given day.
This step focuses on diagnosing the root cause of the overwhelm and then making a plan to improve it incrementally. Usually, it’s not something we can solve overnight, but once we figure out the root cause, we can be more strategic with our approach to address it.
We can then focus on how they can use their time more effectively and ultimately get more done. This approach often translates into typically making more money and having more ease in their day-to-day work.
Getting Stuck in Analysis Paralysis
Let’s look at a few examples to illustrate further how I help my clients battle business overwhelm.
Recently, I had a client who knew she needed a different approach. She’s adding a group program to the mix, and her current consulting work is paid via direct invoices which wasn’t going to work for a standalone course.
So, this one item of “how to charge” had been sitting on her to do list for weeks. She was making great progress on the course material and the build, but this one thing kept tripping her up.
Does she use the membership site that she’s using for the course? Does she buy another tool? And if she buys another tool, what is that tool? There are about 700 to choose from! Does she also have to worry about it integrating with her course platform? Ahhh!!!
Once she brought it up to me during a planning session for the course launch, all it took was a five-minute conversation, during which we discussed three different options that I have experience with and that I’ve helped clients set up. All three of these were ones she had already considered as well.
I gave her some pros and cons about people’s three most common solutions.
I also recommended which one I typically prefer and solved a problem that had been weighing on her for weeks in minutes.
It’s Not the Time, It’s the Bandwidth
Another example of how our approach works in practice was with a newer client. We started discussing what is causing her to be unable to accomplish her daily priorities. During the discussion, I realized she still handles all her customer service.
That means she constantly manages the inbox and responds to all her customers herself. Because it’s an e-commerce brand, there are many customer service tasks, like updating subscriptions and shipping addresses, answering questions, and more.
Because my client had gotten so used to doing it all, she had convinced herself that she wasn’t spending that much time on it, and therefore, it wasn’t a problem.
However, it is, in fact, a huge problem. It’s not just about the time it takes but the bandwidth and capacity it’s eating up. It’s eating into her ability to complete other tasks, contributing to her overwhelm.
And of all the things on her to-do list, this is one of the easier ones to outsource, right?
Here’s the thing, though. She already had an inkling that it needed to be outsourced. She’d tried a couple of things that had yet to really work, so she decided she had the ability to deal with this right now and would keep doing it herself.
After discussing it, we made a plan, wrote a job description, and sought someone to help her.
And me? I’m doing most of the leg work to help find that person.
Notably, it took a discussion with someone outside looking in to bring this back up and create an action plan. Despite this overwhelming her, she needed someone to talk it through with and take on some of the emotional labor of putting a plan into action.
There’s No Prize for Being an Overwhelmed Business Owner
As you can see above, my mission as an online business manager transcends the mere delegation of tasks; it is about crafting strategies to free overwhelmed business owners from the tasks that bog them down.
By guiding my clients through the labyrinth of decision-making and emotional overwhelm, we help them overcome analysis paralysis and increase their bandwidth to focus on activities essential to business growth.
If you’re an overwhelmed business owner needing support, let’s talk!